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Marketing Secrets

Welcome To Russell Brunson’s Marketing Secrets Podcast. So, the big question is this, “How are entrepreneurs like us, who didn’t cheat and take on venture capital, who are spending money from our own wallets, how do we market in a way that lets us get our products and services and things that we believe in out to the world… and yet still remain profitable?” That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Russell Brunson, and welcome to MarketingSecrets.com.
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Now displaying: Category: marketing in your car
May 20, 2013

How to use controversy to create a fan-base and to sell more of your stuff.

---Transcript---

Hey everybody, welcome to the Marketing in Your Car podcast. This is Russell Brunson and I'm excited for today's podcast. I hope you all had an awesome weekend. I had a chance to go on a family trip down to a wedding, which was always fun. While I was driving, my thoughts were upon marketing.

I wanted to give you guys an eight hour podcast. That's how long I was in the car but I was dealing with a bunch of crazy kids and a beautiful wife, so was not able to do one but I was thinking a lot about it. I got some good topics for this week coming up. I want to go through a bunch of them.

Right now is the one that I was most excited about, and it's the topic of polarity. This is one of the keys in your marketing. If you learn how to master this, it will mean more traffic, more sales, and a lot more repeat sales and raving fans. The back story behind where this concept came from today, I got a Skype from one of my close marketing buddies who makes a lot of money but is very conservative, very neutral type personality.

He Skyped me and said, “Man, I can't believe how much drama you've been involved with in the last month.” At first, I was trying to remember, “What drama was he talking about?” Then I remembered all the drama we've been involved with in the last month. It's been really interesting.

One thing in the drama, some of you guys remember I was competing for a Ferrari which I won. I thrashed the guy who took number two, and the number two guy did not take that very happily. The last four days of the contest, he went out there and started this whole hate smear campaign against me which was kind of funny. It was like a two year old girl crying after getting beat up by a bigger kid. That's kind of what it reminded me of.

He was doing all this stuff, and there was all this controversy was caused, and there were people that were really upset at him, and people upset at me but what was interesting is the last day of the contest, I didn't really say much. He was the one out there ranting and raving, and posting stuff all over Facebook and trying to trash me, and tell everyone he was a better person than me.

We had three times the sales the last day than we had the entire prior last week combined, so it worked in our favor tremendously. In fact, I had a bunch of JV partners who were so annoyed at what he was doing, they actually went out there and were promoting, without me even asking, were promoting my bonus package just so that he wouldn't win which was kind of funny. It all kind of comes around.

Then we were in the middle of this launch of Rippln which I'm sure some of you guys have had a chance to see that. I was brought under to write the whole sales and marketing part of the company launch, help orchestrate all that stuff. It's been going amazing. We've gotten over half a million people to sign up in the first 30 days. It's been fun, but with that, there's been a lot of controversy written about it.

We had Tech Crunch, this big huge tech blog, go and write. They don't really write anti articles but they wrote a huge anti article about my video, the pre-launch video which made me proud. Then we got Salty Droid did a write-up on it, and some other guys who think they're cool wrote big write-ups about how we're scam artists, and all this stuff.

It kind of made me smile because all this fuel has just been great for our business, for our brand, for everything that we're doing. The controversy behind things has been awesome. Now, what I want to talk about today is the concept of polarity. Polarity is the opposite of neutrality. A lot of people in their marketing want to be very neutral. They don't want to offend anybody.

They are very careful not to step on anybody's toes but the problem with being neutral is when you're neutral, you're boring. Nobody listens to you. Nobody pays attention. As much fun as it is to make everybody happy, that's not the way to make money. I don't know about you guys, but I'm not in this business to make everybody happy. I'm in this business to make money.

The neutrality behind most people's marketing is what keeps them from really succeeding. It makes them irrelevant. It makes them so that people don't really talk about you. You may have some people that are interested but nobody talks about you. That's what causes your business and your brand to grow.

It was interesting, I was talking to Mike Filson about this awhile ago, and Mike said one of his biggest things he's always trying to do is figure out how can I stay relevant. He said, “You know, guys like me and him have been in this market for 10 years and so, and you look at how many people and personalities have come and gone in that time,” and he said, “most of them just aren't relevant anymore. What are we doing to stay relevant, to stay top of mind, to stay on people's radar?”

Because literally, in the internet world, if you're quiet for a week, you're pretty much gone. You've disappeared off the radar, which is a whole other story in of itself, why it's important to contact your audience more often, email at least daily. Daegan, one of my close buddies, he preaches emailing twice a day.

Staying relevant is a big thing. Back to the neutrality part of it, I was reading this thing awhile ago. This is a couple of years ago so I'm sure I don't know the stats but the concept, I remember. It was talking about Howard Stern and about people that watch his show. They did surveys.

They found the average person who liked his show listened for 35 or 40 minutes at a time, and the average person who hated his show listened for over an hour at a time. When they surveyed both audiences to find out why they listened, the reason was the same in both cases. It was, “We wanted to hear what he was going to say next.”

That's really a key here. You look at the great figureheads, you look at the people that have the big brands, just in the celebrity world. We just watched the finale of Celebrity Apprentice last night. Look at Donald Trump. When he was doing this whole campaign against Obama when he was going to run for president, this whole thing about Obama, trying to bring out his birth certificate, that for me, I don't care which side you’re on or anything like that, but it was interesting.

It got people talking and noise, and all this stuff. People hated Donald Trump for it, people loved him because of it but he caused polarity. What happens when you cause polarity is there will be a group of people who despise you and who hate you. Most people don't do that in their marketing because they're scared of that. They don't want that.

That was always really, really tough for me. It was really tough for me to see people talk bad about me. In fact, it's still hard for my employees when they see stuff like that. For me, it doesn't bother me anymore. It's been happening long enough, I get it. There are going to be people that don't like me. I'm okay with that.

The other interesting fact about polarity is when you create a group of people and make them dislike you, it also takes another group of people and makes them love you 10 times more. That's the power of polarity. When you switch from being in a neutral state where you're trying to please everybody to a polar state where you pick the things you want to do and not want to do, stuff like that, again, you get people who despise you and you'll get people who love you.

Those people who love you will spend so much more money with you because of that. They're attracted to that polarity. I look at all the people that I spend money with. I buy things in a lot of different niches. The people I buy from are always the kind of crazy people a little bit. I always joke the crazy people have the best ideas.

I always like to subscribe to what they're doing and they’re talking about. That's what I spend my money on because me and everybody, even if they won't admit it, you like the people on the fringes. You like the heretics. You like the people that are kind of pushing the envelope because it's more interesting. It's a more interesting conversation to talk about, to think about, to participate in, and people are attracted to that.

At the same time, like I said, there are going to be people who are not attracted to that but if that's happening, that's a good thing. Dan Kennedy, one of my mentors, he said, “If you haven't offended somebody by noon each day, then you're not marketing hard enough.” I know that's going to be hard for a lot of you guys but it's the key.

One thing I want to mention about polarity is there's a right and a wrong way to do this. The right way, at least the way that I subscribe to is I don't go out there trying to pick fights. I just do what I'm going to do, and then I stand behind it. For example, the whole Rippln thing, we did it and I stood behind it.

The launch for Pure Leverage that we won, we did our thing, I stood behind it but I wasn't going out there picking fights. I look at the guy who we thrashed in the contest, and I look at the way that he was trying to create polarity. I think it backfired on him. He went out there and started a hate smear campaign against me and made videos, and posted on Facebook every 30 seconds for two days about how much he hated me, and how he was going to steal my Ferrari, and all this stuff.

It was really distasteful, and maybe he got some audience from that. He probably did but all I know is that he was polar so far to the other opposite, to the other extreme, that the people in our market, our peers were so turned off by what he was doing that they started promoting my stuff without me even ever asking.

I think there's a level where you can go way too far and you outcast so many people that they don't want to become part of what you're doing. There's kind of a fine line there. With the two campaigns this month that caused all of our controversy, I wasn't doing anything really. I was just doing my thing.

Because we were doing it and we were doing it aggressively and we were doing it well, it caused people to become upset and it caused people to become huge fans. That's what I want to say about polarity. Don't go out there. You're not trying to be a thug. You're not trying to go cause fights and that kind of thing.

People can see through that. It's not the right way to do it. It's just coming out there and being yourself, not being nervous about who you are, and just doing it. It was interesting, two days ago, I was in our garage. I rented a power washer and power washed our whole driveway. It was super fun. If anyone hasn't done that, it's a fun project.

I power washed the whole driveway. Then I found these boxes that got wet. In some of the boxes, there was this tube. I pulled the tube out. I remember seeing when I was a kid. I pulled it out and there was a picture of my ninth grade graduating class inside of it. I opened it up and saw all of my friends, all these people that meant so much to me.

I looked at it, and there wasn't a single person in that picture that I've kept in contact with over the last, I guess ninth grade was probably 13 or 14 years ago now. There wasn't a single person that I kept in contact with. I remember sitting there looking. I remember being the shy, awkward ninth grader who was so concerned about what everybody else in that picture thought.

It's all I could think about, “What if they don't like me? What if they make fun of me? What if whatever?” Because of that, I didn't thrive in that environment. I was an awkward, shy teenager. For me, I didn't start thriving until I started wrestling in high school. That's when I found my thing. I just stopped caring about everybody else and focused on that thing.

I think that so many of us in our business, we're like that shy, awkward ninth grader in the picture who wants everybody to like them and because of that, they stop bringing their own personality into the game. They're so concerned about nobody making fun of them that they're just neutral and just sitting there.

Because of that, nobody knows who they are. I was so neutral and I was so boring in ninth grade, that I guarantee you if I showed that picture to everyone in that graduating class, most of them would have no idea who I was because I was that shy, awkward, neutral person who didn't want to offend or talk about anybody.

You look at the high school graduation, it was different because I had picked my thing. Wrestling was my thing. I focused on that, and people knew who I was because of that. It's the same way in your business, you guys. Quit worrying about what the haters, what the people who don't like you are thinking.

Quit worrying about everything else. Just be yourself. Who are you at your core? Just go out there and do that. Whatever it is that gets you excited in the morning, go and do that kind of stuff. The way you talk to your audience, listen, this podcast was me talking in my car. It makes me laugh because I did a news segment the other day on Huffington Post.

It was really cool. Our PR person afterwards messaged me and said, “Russell, you really need to learn how to clean up your ums and your ahs.” I thought, “You know what? Yeah, I could do that but then I’d be losing who I am.” I want to connect with you guys at a personal level because that's where you're coming to me.

You're coming to me with personal issues. You want your business to grow. I could give you the textbook answer or I could give you what actually works. That's my goal is to be real with you guys. I want you guys to do the same thing, to be real with yourself and not be scared of polarity. It is a good thing that's going to help you win this game.

Step off your neutral line. Quit trying to please everybody, and just be yourself. If you do that, like I said, you'll find a group of people that don't like you and they're going to be mean to you, and there are going to be hate blogs about you. Who knows how extreme it will get.

The more aggressive you get, the more exciting you are, the more people will come out of the wood works to write hate blogs about you. It makes me laugh nowadays when I see the ones that people write about me but at the same time, because of that polarity, just by the nature of how polar opposites work, while one group will move away from you, another bigger, larger group that's more passionate and more willing to spend money will move towards you. That is the key, you guys.

That is the key to this whole attraction marketing game. That's what I had for you guys today. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm at the office now. I have a fun day. I'm going to try to ruffle some feathers, do some fun marketing, and hopefully it makes people angry and in the interim, makes some people really, really happy. If I can do that, I've succeeded.

If you can do that, you've succeeded as well. Thanks you guys. Again, if you had any good experiences with this podcast so far, please go to iTunes.com, go to the comment section, leave your comments, leave your feedback. I love it. Right now, it's my most exciting thing everyday to go look at the comments. Please leave comments, love to hear from you guys, and we'll talk to you all soon.

May 13, 2013

One little tweak, to increase the results of everything you do.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson from DotComSecrets.com and this is the Marketing in Your Car podcast. I wanted to thank everybody who left feedback and comments over the weekend on the podcast. I think it was like 174 people commenting which is awesome. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. We even hit, I think we're at number fortieth top podcast last week which was pretty cool. Thank you guys all for that.

I got some funny comments in there I'm reading. One person said that because of me, it's the first time they ever subscribed to iTunes which was pretty cool, so Apple should be giving me a percentage of anything you buy in the future. I also saw somebody say that the loved the podcast because they have the ability to slow down my voice on their phone. That's a good thing I think.

I obviously have about a six minute commute to the office but I try to cram in about 15 minutes worth of content, just how fast I talk. That should give you guys the ability to slow me down if your commute is longer and get all the stuff out of it. Today, my podcast is going to be a little different than normal.

Usually, I'm sharing marketing tips or tricks, things like that but I want to talk about something that's a little different but some of you guys may even be like, “This has nothing to do with anything exciting for me,” but I promise you that it has everything to do with marketing in your business.

What I want to talk about is the word awesome. We've got this little guy, he's about 22 years old that lives by us. He's got, I'm going to pronounce it wrong, he has cerebral palsy so he's handicapped. His legs don't fully function. He can walk with braces on his legs but very, very slow.

In fact, every time I pick him up, he wants to walk from his doorstep to my car and he wants me to time him. It takes about 15 to 20 minutes to walk that distance. He tries to talk but his speech is really hard for him to talk and get things out. I have to listen very, very hard to be able to understand what he's saying, just this cutest little kid.

We take him every week to church and hang out with him there. About once a week, we bring him over to our house for dinner. His name is Jesse. I just want to talk to you a little bit about Jesse because Jesse is someone who is amazing. Every time I call him, I say, “Hey Jesse, how is it going, man?” and his response is always, “Awesome.”

Everyday, every time I hang out with him, he says, in his broken language, he says, “Russell, I love my life.” It's really amazing to me because he's someone who has so many things against him, so many disabilities. He can barely walk, can barely talk yet any time I ask him about how he's doing, he's always doing awesome.

I think it's such a great lesson. I started working on my kids. I told my kids, “Look, most people live their lives everyday in a state of good. You ask them, 'Hey, how are you doing today?' 'Good.'” Have you noticed that? Every single person you do says, “Good.”

About three or four years ago, the first time I went to a Tony Robbins event, I made a conscious decision that any time somebody asked me how I was doing, I would never say good again. I would say awesome. I started doing that and I started saying awesome. It's so funny what happens.

When you're at the airport at five in the morning and the person is checking your ID, “How are you doing?” “I'm doing awesome,” and it always catches them off guard, “Wow, what happened to you today?” What was interesting is it just changes the whole entire dynamics of your day and about every situation you're in when somebody asks how you're doing.

Instead of saying good, you say, “I'm doing awesome.” I started training my kids that. I said, “Look guys, when someone asks how you're doing, you can't say good. Everyone else in the world is good. We don't want to be good. We want to be awesome.” I got all my kids doing that now.

It's funny when they hear somebody saying, “How are you doing?” “Good,” they say, “Daddy says we are awesome,” and they always tell everybody we're awesome. You may think that's such a little insignificant thing but what's interesting is I don't think it is.

I think it has to do with everything about how you produce, how you perform in life because everything we're doing, every situation we're in, we're bound by the state that we're in. If I, for example, when I was wrestling, if I would go in a wrestling match and if I was in a bad mood or if I thought I might lose, or if I wasn't excited and I walked down the mat, a lot of times, I would lose because the state that I was in.

What I found is it really correlates over into business, athletics, business, relationships, whatever it is. The state that you're experiencing whatever you're doing in has so much to do with your outcome.

If I got a hard day of work that day and I show up, “Oh man, I got a lot of work to do,” instantly, because of the state I put myself in, “Ugh,” I can't perform to my top level. It's just impossible. If I come back and I shift it where I wake up in the morning and I walk in the office and say, “Awesome, excited to be here today,” suddenly the state you're in is different and your performance level completely changes.

It's shocking. You'll notice how little of a thing that is but how huge of an impact and how big of a result it is. I remember when I was wrestling in high school, I had a coach. His name was Mark James. I remember I think it was my sophomore or maybe my junior year, we had a really hard practice.

Afterwards, he took everyone in the back hall. He was talking to us. He talked to us almost an hour. I don't remember a lot of what he said but there were a couple of things that really stuck out to me. One of them he said was just talking about the power of our attitude. He said that the attitude you have is going to drive everything one direction or the other direction.

He said, “Look, everyday we're coming here for practice, we're working out anyway.” He said, “You're going to be doing the work no matter what so you can either do it with a negative attitude and make the whole thing miserable or you can have a great attitude and everything feels positive.”

He's like, “You're going to be here for two hours a day anyway in the room working out hard. Just choose your attitude. Choose the right one because if you do, your results will be 10 times better because of it.” I remember taking that to heart.

For those of you who know much about wrestling, in wrestling, we used to cut a lot of weight. This was back when I was in high school, it was before, it was actually my senior year in high school, there were three kids that died cutting weights so they changed all the rules and made it a lot more difficult but prior to that, we used to cut a lot of weight. I was cutting about 30 pounds every single week of water weight.

That was a lot of work. It would take about three or four days to lose 30 pounds of water weight, and then we'd go weigh in, boom, we'd eat, and three hours later, we were back to the same weight we started but I was doing that every single week for an entire season. It was draining. It was hard.

I remember thinking about Coach James, what he told me about, “You're going to be here no matter what. Just have a good attitude and everything will be different.” I remember I used to put my plastic gear on. I’d put my sweats on, and I started jumping rope. I’d try it with a big smile on my face.

Everyone is like, “Why are you smiling? You're cutting weight.” I remember I used to tell people, “Look, I've never lost with a smile on my face.” I said, “When I lose a match, I'm depressed, I'm angry, I'm frustrated. I might be crying, whatever it might be but I've never lost a match with a smile on my face so I'm going to have a smile on my face while I'm doing this because I don't want to lose.”

That was the attitude that I had in wrestling. It took me very, very far in high school and also at a college level. It's also really helped me a lot in business as well. That's something I've tried to do when we've had ups and downs. What's interesting about my business is we've had some big, big ups and some big, big downs.

I know everybody out there struggles in business. Some of you guys are struggling to make your first dollar. Some of you are struggling to figure out what product to sell. Some of you guys are trying to struggle to figure out how to get to the next level but I've had some big wins and big losses.

We were at the point with our company, we were doing a million dollars in sales a month and all of our merchant accounts got frozen. If you can imagine making a million dollars in sales a month with over 100 employees, that's a lot of overhead. I think our overhead at the time was about $700,000 to $800,000 a month.

When suddenly your merchant accounts get shut down, you have no ability to collect cash, man, that's a scary situation. There are different ways to look at it. One is depressed, frustrated, and the world is picking on me type thing but what happens when you put on that attitude? As soon as you do, everything shuts down and you can't produce, or you can step up and wake up in the morning and say, “Today is awesome, I'm going to go attack this thing and figure out how to beat this thing,” and you walk in.

Suddenly, the state you're in is a little different. Because of that, you can produce, the ideas come faster, the energy of the people that are around you changes, and it just changes the whole dynamic. For all you guys out there, I guess my point of today's podcast is I want you guys to be like Jesse.

I want you guys waking up every morning and when somebody asks you how you're doing, don't be good. Good is the enemy of greatness. Don't be good. You be awesome. Next time somebody today asks you, “How are you doing today?” just see what happens. Tell them you're doing awesome, and look at the strange looks you'll get on their face.

A couple of things will happen. First off, you'll put yourself and keep yourself in a peak state of performance that you need to be in in order to be able to produce in whatever you're doing. Second off, you'll start raising the level of people around you, whether it be your employees, the people you're interacting with but as soon as you tell somebody you're doing awesome, it puts a smile on their face and changes that person's attitude as well.

You'll start affecting other people and kind of like a bee that flies around from flower to flower, all they're doing is trying to get their nectar, trying to get their pollen but because they're doing that and they're spreading the stuff around, that's what makes all the other flowers blossom and bloom, and makes it all possible. Do that for yourself. Do it for the people around you but give yourself that gift of awesomeness.

Just be excited. Be happy. I don't care how depressed you are or what situation you're in, whatever it might be.

If you can just change your state, instead of being good, be awesome, just like Jesse, I don't care what situation you're in and how tough life could possibly be, you can weather those storms and come out victorious and on top. Also remember, you can't lose with a smile on your face. That's what I got for today, you guys. I'm at the office.

I hope you guys have an awesome day today. Again, make sure you let other people know about this podcast if you're enjoying it at all, and if you got any feedback or comments, we'd love to see them on iTunes. Thanks everybody, and I’ll talk to you again tomorrow.

May 10, 2013

On this episode, Russell discusses how to properly use preframing in every step of your online sales sequence.

---Transcript---

Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing in Your Car podcast. I hope you guys are doing awesome today. I actually just got out of the gym and I'm driving back to the office and had something really exciting happen today that I wanted to share with everybody, actually, a bunch of exciting things.

First off, we had almost 100 of you guys comment on the podcast yesterday which is exciting because I asked everyone to give some feedback. I appreciate it. Keep the good comments coming. It's fun, it's exciting, and hopefully we'll get more people to learn about our podcast because I'm sharing all this cool stuff and we should share it with everyone. I want to see everybody's businesses grow. That's my passion in life.

With that said, if anyone has been studying my stuff for awhile, I did a really cool talk at StomperNet four or five years ago. I did another one kind of similar at Dan Kennedy's event about two years ago, not so much talking about internet marketing but talking about the sales process and the psychology behind it. There's something that happened in our business today that was really exciting that re-reminded me of that.

If you guys saw that presentation, and if you go to YouTube I think, at least Google, if you type in “Russell Brunson StomperNet presentation,” you can hear the whole 90 minute presentation. I was talking about just all the different things that happened, the lifeline of your customer. Somebody comes to your website and what website do they come through to get to your website?

When they’re there, what do they see? What's the next step, and the next step? I talked about all the pieces that you need to have in place to maximize your customer value. One of the big things I talked about was the concept that if you've ever studied NLP before, neuro-linguistic programming, you learn about a topic called framing which is basically the frame that somebody enters a situation will have a huge determining factor on the response they have on the next site, the next page.

For example, if I'm going to frame you to my friends, introduce you to my friend, I'll introduce you through a frame, “Hey, this is Joe. He's a really cool guy. I think you're going to like him.” The frame that I introduced you to my friend through, now he's going to think, “Oh yeah, Joe is a cool guy.” If I say, “Hey, this is Joe, he's a total jerk. He stole money from me. I want to introduce you to him,” that frame is going to be different and their whole experience with you is going to be different.

In fact, there's a really cool book. I can see the cover in my head but I can’t remember it right now, but in that book, they shared a case study of a teacher that was tested in a college classroom. They had a substitute teacher for the day. Before the substitute teacher came in, the principal or whatever came in and said, “Hey, we have a substitute teacher. Before I introduce him, I’d like you guys to read his bio really quick. Then I'm going to have him come in.”

They handed out the bio to all the students in the class, in a class of 900 people or so. The surveys were exactly the same of the bios except for each of them had one word different. Half of the bios said, “Mr. So-and-so is a very warm teacher,” and the other half said, “Mr. So-and-so is a very cold teacher.”

That was the only difference between the frame that these guys had to meet the teacher. The teacher came in. He gave the entire class, and at the end of it, they surveyed all the students. What was interesting was that, again, all the students heard the exact same lecture, all of them read the exact same bio.

The only difference was that half the bios said he was a warm teacher, and half said he was a cold teacher. When they surveyed the students, the students that the paper said he was a warm teacher, the vast majority said, “He was an amazing teacher, he was great, I learned a lot.” The people whose paper said he was a cold teacher didn't like him, thought he was talking down to him, he was a rude person.

It was interesting how that little tiny shift of a frame, how much it affected the reality of that class afterwards. I'm always talking about and I always teach and do, when you're sending somebody to your website, what's the frame they're coming through. The ad that they click on is a frame they're going to your website through.

If you land them on a review site before they come to your site, that was a frame you were taking them through. There's a lot to do with different frames that you're taking someone through and how it affects the outcome on the other side. We did this test just in the last two or three days. It was really interesting.

We have this squeeze page. On the squeeze page, it's kind of like a multi-step squeeze page where they first land on it, and it has a headline and it says, “Step number one, where did you learn about us?” There's radio buttons they can choose, “Did you learn from this source, this source, or this source?”

They click on the button. Then boom, it says, “Step number two, give us your email address.” Then step number three said finish. That was the way that this squeeze page worked. Step one, two, three, and step three was finish.

The only test we changed was we changed the word finish to “Get Instant Access.” That was the entire test. What was interesting, and I almost got this wrong, we ran the test. What was interesting was that when it said “Finish” at the end, we had 40% bump in opt-ins because the last step is when they actually give you their email address, and then it says, “Click here to finish.”

We're like, “Wow, this is a great test. We found out we increased our opt-in rates by 40 percent.” I was even telling my guys, “We should change all of our opt-in buttons that said, 'Submit here,' to, 'Click here to finish.'” We were really excited, but then after they opt-in, then we take them to the next page which takes them to a video sales letter where then we sell them the product we were trying to sell them. Then they land on that page.

What was interesting was when we looked at the data between the two, we had a 40% increase in people who opted in clicking the finish button, but then we had almost a 40% decrease in sales across the board, dramatically. It actually more than, the sales more than cut in half percentage wise, the people who clicked on finish versus the people that clicked on “Get Instant Access.”

You never really know why that works but psychology teaches me, what I believe is that the frame I was taking somebody through with the finish button was saying, “Hey, this process is finished. You're done.” In their mind, it's saying, “Okay, it's complete, I'm finished,” and then off comes this page trying to sell them something, and I've closed that loop. I've closed that gap.

Now they're not in a buying position because just that little tiny, just the word on the button closed the gap on their mind which decreased sales by 50% whereas the “Get Instant Access Now,” then took them to a page where the loop was still open, they were trying to see what the next step was, and they were more in a state of mind where they could purchase.

It was a very interesting test. Just think about how you guys can apply that into your business. It's all about pre-framing, opening and closing loops, a whole bunch of really cool NLP stuff that I wrap into one little five minute lesson but just think about that, guys, on your sales processes. What are you doing? Are you keeping the loop open? Are you keeping them excited, or are you shutting them off and keeping them from making the sale you want?

I remember on a one-time offer before we did a test awhile ago, similar type concept where they purchased the product and a one-time offer came up. It said, “Thank you so much for ordering. Your product is in the mail. By the way, we have this other special offer.” We tested that versus, “Wait, your order is not finished yet. Finish order customization, step one of three.”

The “Wait, your order is not over yet, order customization,” that text dramatically thrashed the other one. It's all about keeping that loop open, keeping the frame you're taking someone through in the correct way that keeps them in the buying mood. Anyway, I thought it was really interesting. That little tweak is going to make me a lot of money this year.

I hope you guys apply that into different sales funnels, squeeze pages, sales processes. Whatever you're doing, think about the frame that someone is entering your website through and you can manipulate that. When you do that, you will manipulate and affect the outcome dramatically. I hope you guys enjoyed this podcast. If you do, please tell your friends. Tell anybody that likes marketing. It's a lot of fun.

Again, if you like this, please leave feedback. Again, this is Russell Brunson with Marketing in Your Car podcast.

May 9, 2013

After you have an offer that’s working in one channel, how do you scale it fast? Russell shows you how to use other marketing channels to scale any offer fast.

---Transcript---

Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in Your Car podcast. I'm excited for today. It's a beautiful day here in Boise. I am excited about everything that's happening. I hope you guys are having a good time in your business as well. Yesterday, I shot a trailer video for the Marketing in Your Car podcast which is kind of fun so hopefully I'll get a lot more subscribers coming in which will be fun. We appreciate all you guys.

Today, I want to talk about what we've been working on the last few days which is not so much what we've been working on but what we've been focusing on. We've been working on our supplement but what's been fun about it is we've been over this past two or three days, we've been really focusing on shifting the channels that we're marketing through.

We found that, just in my business as a whole, there are a couple of channels that I'm really, really good at. By channels, I mean like a distribution channel, a different type of traffic. For example, a channel could be TV, newspaper could be a channel, radio could be a channel, things like that.

Obviously we're online. Most people just lump the internet together as one big huge, it's the internet but it's obviously not. There are a lot of channels on the internet, almost more than you can even count. There are three or four channels that I personally am really, really good at. One is the joint venture affiliate channel. I'm really good at that channel.

The next one is email media buying. We're really good at that channel. Direct mail, we're pretty good at that channel. Those are channels we're good at. We've focused primarily as we've rolled out our supplement on those channels. So far, it's doing really, really good.

We keep adding in more pieces to that. For example, with email media buying, we found some lists that are converting, their offers are converting really well to. What we do because we want to make our offer evergreen is instead of sending out just one solo ad that goes out to the entire list once and then moving onto the next list, we set it up so that our solo ad goes out to a portion of that list every single week.

For example, we have an ad running with World Net Daily right now, and I think their list is like a million people or something like that, so right now, our ad goes out to one seventh of the list every Monday, which is cool because every time it goes out, we make 50, 60, 100 sales, and it's just consistent though as opposed to we could send out one email, get a whole bunch of sales and then it ends.

This way, we can do that and it rotates through it every seven or eight weeks, we've hit the entire list and then it starts over and keeps going. It's an evergreen type thing. We have something similar with our Dot Com Secrets local offer. We have a couple of people that mail to a percentage of their list every single day, it just rotates through their list.

That way, it's more of an evergreen thing as opposed to just a one-time strategy. We've been doing those, studying the lists for it, finding joint venture partners, a bunch of stuff like that and it's been going really, really good but now that we're getting these channels dialed in and the numbers are working good, and they're consistent, what other channels can we add to this?

It's been really fun looking at that because there are so many different ways to drive traffic. You have Facebook, we have Google, we have the other ad networks. We have PPV stuff, CPV, there's so many different channels and ways to do it. It can get overwhelming.

What we've been doing is just really strategically looking at the ones that we want to test first. Some of them, again, that we're really good at doing and some we're really bad at doing so we're finding partners in each of those spaces like someone who is a lot better than me at Facebook because I don't think I’ll ever be good at Facebook just because I can't stand logging into Facebook, so finding somebody who is good at that and let them run it, test it, and try a bunch of things, and maybe invest $1000 or $2000 in that source trying to see if we can make it work, testing it, trying it, and just perfecting it until we can get that channel to work.

If we can't get that channel to work, that's fine too. That's one thing that a lot of people don't understand is that just because it works in one channel doesn't mean it's going to work in another channel. If we can’t get it to work, then move on, try another channel and keep going through but it's just kind of fun.

The reason I wanted to talk about this today is because about a year ago, I had a really interesting conversation with Perry Belcher who is one of the smartest marketers I've ever met, and a really cool guy too but he was talking about they had hired Mary Ellen Tribby to be their CEO for a year, year and a half, something like that.

I remember when they first hired her, I said, “What was the reason why you brought her in to be your CEO?” He said, “Mary Ellen always says that us internet marketers, that we're crazy because we go out there and we spend all this time, effort, and money creating an offer, getting it out there. We launch it, make a bunch of sales, and then the next day, we're onto the next project.”

He said, “The way Mary Ellen looks at business is more like a play. How crazy would it be if you were to make a big play, you go to hire the actors, the directors, and you guys practice for six months, and you go on, you go in Boise, Idaho, and you put on this play. It's a smashing success and everybody loves it, and then you just go home.”

He said, “No, if that works, and you're making a ton of money off it, then you take that play on the road. You take that show on the road and you go to Chicago, and then Dallas, and Denver. You take it across the country and across the world. You turn that success into tens of millions of dollars.”

He said, “That's the way that she looks at internet marketing is you create a good offer, and then you got to take it on the road.” That's what we've been really focusing on with our supplement is we created the good offer. Now we're taking it on the road and we’re focusing on taking it to Dallas, Denver, and Chicago, and all these different channels.

We've got direct mail going forward now. We have all these different things. We're just adding channel after channel after channel and taking that from an idea that right now is doing good money to by the time this year is out, it should be doing insane amounts of money just because we're really dialing in channel by channel, and perfecting each of those.

Just something to think about in your own business and your own marketing is after you've got something working is taking that and changing the channel, and focusing on different areas, and really scaling it, taking your show on the road. I'm at the office. I hope you guys enjoyed that. If you like the Marketing in Your Car podcast, please go into iTunes and rate us. I would really appreciate it. I appreciate you guys. We'll talk to you all soon.

May 2, 2013

We spent 2 hours today looking at ways we could improve our sales funnel and were able to almost double how much money we make on every single new customer. This episode reveals ideas you can use to strengthen your funnel.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and this is the Marketing in Your Car podcast. I want to welcome you guys to today. I don't know about you, but it's a beautiful day today and I'm having a good time. Yesterday was one of the most fun days I've had at the office in a long, long time. I want to talk to you about what we did because it's really exciting. It's something that everybody else should be doing in their business as well.

We've got a supplement that we've been selling for the last six months or so, and it's been doing really well but we're always trying to figure out ways to increase how much money we make per customer so that we can spend more on advertising because as you know, whoever can spend the most money on advertising wins in this game.

Right now, we're spending about $30 to $40 to get somebody to sign up for a free trial, which is good and right now, what we're doing is the trial is 14 days long so after about 14 days, actually at day 14, we're a little bit above break even right now. It's working good but it's still kind of scary because we have that two week float that we're waiting before we make our money back.

That's where we're at right now. We've been trying to figure out how do you, what can we add to make it so that we can make money for every single customer. We started looking at our entire sales process, and that turned into something where I was actually at the office last night until one working on it because we had so much fun with it.

We looked first at our sales process. We looked at people coming to our site, they see the offer, step one, we ask for the shipping, step two, we ask for the credit card. Now, what are things we're missing? What happens about people that come to page one but they leave? We're not following up with them.

We put banner retargeting on that page so that when somebody comes and then they leave, we follow them around with banners everywhere. That was the first thing. Then we said, they come, they opt in, but they don't buy, what do we do? We built out a whole email follow-up sequence to try to close them.

Then if they do buy, what do we do? Some of us were thinking, “What else could we sell them?” Right now, we've got our supplement and we're trying to figure out what other products we could sell. We're looking out on the market trying to find all different things that other people were already selling to our customers.

Finally, we found a skin cream that actually related really well to it. We called the company up and within about five minutes, they agreed to private label it for us. Boom, suddenly we had our own skin cream to go with our front end supplements. Now we had an upsell. Then we went out there and tried to find some other products.

We found a website that had ten different products for people in our target market, and we called them up. Sure enough, they agreed to let us sell every one of the products that are on their website, and we get like a 75% profit margin on all these products. Then we found a couple other things we could add in the funnel.

Anyway, pretty quickly, within two or three hours of us just asking that question of what else can we do? When we look at our sales funnel, somebody comes in, what pages are they going to, what are they doing? Then we try to think, how do we maximize, how do we make each of these steps better?

What can we add here to get more people, to close more people, to convert them or to get people who leave, to get them to come back, and people who buy, how to get them to buy again, at what price points, and stuff like that? Within a couple of hours of asking those questions, we were able to change our funnel.

Obviously we haven't had a chance to drive traffic to it yet. We just finished six or seven hours ago, but now, you look at our funnel and it's much more robust. I think right now, we're looking at if we get 20% of the people to take our upsell for our skin cream, our front end profit doubles. That means we could spend $60 to $70 to acquire a customer, and we'd still be okay.

It's just interesting and it's been so much fun. For all you guys, I want you to take a look at your sales funnels, your products that are already doing well, that are already converting, and just think, “What else could we add here? What kind of upsell could we add? What kind of downsell could we add? What kind of exit pop-up could we put in here? If we follow these people with banners if they leave, what's our follow-up sequence look like? Do we add more messages to our follow-up sequence?”

These are all the questions you should be asking. When you start asking those kinds of questions, it makes a good sales process very quickly become a great sales process. It's really been exciting for me and for everybody here on our team. I woke up early again this morning. I haven't slept very much but I'm excited to get back in the office and keep on cranking it out, and doing some more because it's just so much fun right now.

Anyway, I just got to the office. I hope you guys enjoy that. My goal for all you guys though right now is to look at your funnel and figure out how to strengthen it, and what things you can add. If you do that, that will be some money you'll find today, and you'll do what I tell you guys to do a lot of times. Give yourself a raise everyday.

You do that by these little tweaks, little changes  that are going to change your business. Thanks to you guys. It's Russell Brunson from DotComSecrets.com and the Marketing in Your Car podcast. If you're enjoying these podcasts, please, please go to iTunes or all you got to do is go to MarketingInYourCar.com and it will redirect you to iTunes where you can go and leave your feedback. We would really appreciate it, and we'll talk to you guys all again soon. Thanks.

May 1, 2013

The forgotten power of adding Scarcity to your offers and Segmenting your lists.

---Transcript---

Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson with DotComSecrets.com and the Marketing in Your Car podcast. I want to welcome you guys to today. It's a beautiful day here in Boise, Idaho. I'm excited to drive to the office but I want to share with you guys something that happened yesterday.

I've been involved, the last 30 days have been kind of crazy in my businesses. On top of everything else, we were in a contest for this one network marketing company that we're involved with for a Ferrari, and it's been crazy trying to win that. Then we also launched a network marketing company called Rippln which has been going crazy, which has right now growing faster than Facebook did.

It's been a crazy 30 days, and the month just ended for us so I'm excited to get back and start focusing on some other projects as well. Today, we're focusing on our supplement which will be fun, but I wanted to share with you one interesting thing that I remembered last night. Back in the day, we used to do a lot of product launches.

We haven't done a product launch in a couple of years because of the stress behind them and all the stuff that goes with a product launch, so we just kind of haven't done them recently but I forgot that when we used to do product launches, we do the big launch. Usually they would be a seven day launch. What was interesting is we would normally sell as much product on the last day of the launch as we would on the first day.

If you looked at the graph, it's almost like a big smiley face, tons of sales, and then it slowly dropped down in the middle of the week, and then the last day would spike back up. For the Ferrari contest, I was beating the other guys pretty well until yesterday. I think we had sold 750 copies of the product, which is pretty dang good.

That's a lot of sales for a 30 day period of time, especially thinking in the middle of it, we spent two and a half weeks launching a network marketing company so I only had basically two weeks to even compete at the contest. Basically, we had sold a lot. I was proud. We were doing really good.

Then yesterday, the contest was ending at midnight Eastern time so the owner of the affiliate program that we're promoting, he basically told me, “Russell, if you can get 40 more sales today, you got a pretty good shot of just winning it pretty easily.” I'm like, “Alright, we'll try to do 40 more sales.”

We started promoting the last day. We had some scarcity obviously because the bonuses we were offering and stuff were going to disappear at midnight. We did a couple of things that were strategic that I think worked out really well for us, but when all was said and done, we sold 188 copies yesterday, yesterday alone, which still blows my mind that we sold that many.

We sold more on that by far than we did on the first day, almost first week. Scarcity played such a huge role in it, 188 copies, just blows my mind. The way we did it is basically a couple of things. I had done webinars leading up to the launch and stuff like that. I've been replaying those webinars.

Yesterday morning, we send an email to the entire list basically saying, “There's 12 hours left. You got to hurry,” then we went through and started making segments of our list. We looked at the webinar. We had about 4300 people that registered for the webinar. We took that list and scrubbed out everybody who had already purchased.

That dropped it down to 3500 people, whatever it was. Then we looked at those who had attended the webinar but didn't buy it, and those who had not attended and didn't buy. I went through and actually made a personal video for each of those segments saying, “Hey, this is Russell and I noticed you registered for the webinar but for some reason, you didn't show up,” and then made one that said, “I saw you registered for the webinar, you were even on it, but for some reason, you didn't buy.”

I made these personal videos. Then I sent it to each of those segments with about six hours left, saying, “There's six hours left. I made a personal video that's important for you to go watch, so go watch it.” Boom, that video went through again that aspect of it to help close people. We used that.

Then I did a two-hour warning just to everybody who had registered for the webinar. I knew that I didn't want to email my whole list again but those 4200 people were the people that were the most interested out of everybody. We sent our two-hour warning right before, and said, “Two hours left, you got to hurry.”

That last two hours, we sold 80 just in the last two hours alone. Then it closed down. It was just a shock to me how, we always talk about having scarcity in your offers but having scarcity when you orchestrate it correctly and you do it right can sell so much product so quickly, that fear of loss people have is such a big thing. Fear of loss, I talked about this before, not on a podcast but a seminar, talking about my kids, how when I try to get my kids to come to dinner.

I'm like, “Come to dinner,” and they just lay there, and nothing you can do to get them off the floor, get them from whatever activity they're doing to come and eat dinner except for one thing. If I come back and I tell my kids like Bowen, “Bowen, Ellie is eating your dinner,” boom, he jumps up and sprints and runs in because that fear of loss is the biggest driving force for little kids. It is for us too.

My message for today is just to think about that. Think about fear of loss and scarcity, and how you could add that to your business. I almost think it's intelligent to pull your products off the market once a month just so you could have a fear of loss. With the Rippln launch, I talked to Brian the owner about this.

I said, right now, they're in this NDA phase. It's all this prelaunch stuff but I was like, “If we, a week before launch, if we shut it down and just said nobody gets any NDAs for seven days, and let them know that a week in advance or two days in advance, 'Hey, we're going to shut this down and you're not going to get any NDAs until actual launch day,' that two day prior, I guarantee will be 50% of the growth of the entire company because of that fear of loss, again, I need to get this now, because in two days from now, I won't be able to lock anybody in.”

It's just interesting. Think about different ways you can use that, whether it be sales, whether it be bonuses or value adds, or upsells, or whatever it is. If you can think about different ways to increase that fear of loss in what you're doing, it will do big things for you. That is my message for today. I'm at the office now. I hope you guys have an awesome day today. Have fun working on your businesses.

If you are enjoying these podcasts at all, please go to the iTunes store. If you just go to MarketingInYourCar.com, it will redirect you to the iTunes place. Please leave us some feedback. We'd love to get some more ratings and reviews in there. It would be fun. I appreciate you guys, and we'll talk to you all tomorrow.

Apr 26, 2013

This is the #1 secret to breaking free from the fear that is keeping you from the success you want.

---Transcript---

Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to the Marketing in Your Car podcast. Today, I actually just got my haircut and I'm driving back home. It was kind of fun, before my haircut, I had somebody call me and they're writing a book, and they want to interview me about success and about stuff like that for the book.

One of the questions that they asked me sparked a thought that I wanted to pass on this podcast. Any of you guys thinking about it as well, basically, the question had to do with why do most people not succeed. What's the reason behind it? Is it fear of success? Is it fear of failure? What is it that causes most people not to succeed? What do you do different that has made it possible for you to have great success?

I started thinking about that. It reminded me of one night, one of my close friends, he's a chiropractor. He just started his chiropractic clinic. It was kind of struggling. He called me one night and asked if I could talk, so we went over to his clinic and sat down and just started talking for a couple of hours.

I could see he was in a really bad place. He was just very concerned and freaking out, and all sorts of stuff. He was just very scared of all the stuff that could happen. Because of that, he didn't know what to do and he couldn't move. He was kind of stuck in this really bad spot. I remember I sat there and thought for a minute.

Then I asked him, I said, “For you to be successful, you got to do what I do. You need to look at what is the worst case scenario.” He said, “Worst case scenario, I go bankrupt.” I'm like, “What does that mean?” “If I go bankrupt, then this, this, this.”

I'm like, “You got to dig deeper. What are your real fears? If bankruptcy is the worst case scenario, what are your fears about that?” “Well, if that happened, that means I would probably lose my house, and if I did that, I would lose this, and this would happen.” I made him sit down and we actually mapped out what was the worst case scenario.

What was that thing? He listed it out. I said, “Look, if you're going to be successful in this venture, you have to be okay with the worst case scenario. Until you are completely okay with the worst case scenario,” I said, “you will be so scared, you won't be willing to gamble the dice and do what you need to do in order to be successful in this business.”

After awhile, he said, “You know what, you're right. I'm okay with that. If that's the worst case scenario, I can live with that. If that's what's going to happen, that's what's going to happen.” As soon as he was able to accept that, then he was able to start producing and start getting out there and actually doing what he needed to do to be successful in the game.

I think that that's a lesson for people in any area of life. In wrestling, I had the same thing. In business, I've had the same thing multiple times where if I don't know what the worst case scenario is, I can’t be successful. A little while ago, we had our merchant account shut down. We had 100 employees that had almost a million dollars a month in payroll, overhead, and expenses, and we lost our merchant accounts.

I remember I went to this paralyzing fear. I didn't know what to do and I didn't know how to move or how to react. I was just stuck. I remember sitting there thinking, “Man, I'm kind of in a bad spot.” It wasn't until I sat down and did this same exercise myself and I said, “What is the worst case scenario?” I said, “Worst case, I've got to shut down our company or I kick out people. I got to file for bankruptcy,” whatever it might be.

I listed those things out and I had to become okay with that. The second I was okay with that, saying, “Look, if that's the worst thing that's going to happen, I can deal with that,” suddenly, that paralyzing fear disappeared and I was able to step up and to produce and do what I needed to do to break through and create something better than the worst case scenario.

That's I think where leadership really comes from. As leaders, we have to have a vision of where we want to go, and then we have to be willing and able to guide ourselves and our team and get there, and be willing to act and move but if we're scared of the worst case scenario, and we keep pushing it to the back of our mind because we don't want to think about it, that will paralyze you and keep you from taking the action you need.

Step number one for any of you guys is list out what's the worst case scenario in the situation. Then become okay with that, and then build a vision to make something better than the worst case. Make something as great and amazing as you can but realize that the worst thing that could possibly happen is that, and if I'm okay with that, then I've got the ability to move and to really shine.

I look at my wrestling. When I was all the way through high school and all the way through college, I was the kind of wrestler I was good in practice but I was much better on the mat. I think part of it was because of my attitude where it was kind of like if I lost, I didn't really care because there's always the next match and the next tournament.

I just competed at a higher level than I think my skill set was. I would always, if you look back at high school and college, I always upset people that I shouldn't have beat because I stepped on the mat and I would just go out there. I think the reason is because a lot of times, people didn't want to lose so bad that I was able to beat them.

For me, my senior year in college was the first time I ever experienced that. I knew people had this problem but I never experienced it until my senior year. My senior year, my very first match, I wrestled a kid who ended up winning the NCAs and was a two-time NCA champ, three time or four time finalist.

I wrestled in this match. I lose to him by one point. I was frustrated but I was like, “Man, I'm at that level. I'm close enough that I should be in the All American this year.” That was my goals. After that match, everything started going downhill. I ended up losing insane amount of matches afterward.

It was so embarrassing to me. I realized later on in the season, luckily I was able to pull myself out of it about halfway through the season, but I realized that my fear of the worst case, because this was my last year, I had to prove it. Everything in my entire career was on the line for this and I had to prove that I could do it.

Because of that, I wasn't able to produce. I wasn't able to succeed and I didn't wrestle as well as I should. I think my senior year is probably my worst year because of that, because I was so afraid, “This is my last shot.” I just want you guys to think about that, if you're in athletics, if you're in business, and in your personal life, your marriage, your family.

Whatever it is, you've got to become okay with the worst case scenario because as soon as you do, it's the most freeing experience you will experience. It gives you the ability to step up and produce, and do what you need to do to get your job done. That is my words of wisdom for today. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope that you got some value out of it.

If you like this, if you like our podcast at all, please go to iTunes and rate us. I would love to see some feedback. It's kind of fun to see some of the reviews coming in. We appreciate you guys. I hope that you get a lot of value out of this, and I will talk to you all tomorrow on our next podcast. Thanks, everybody.

Apr 25, 2013

Learn a few strategies for making a ton of $$$ by using Google hangouts. This will work for any business to double your sales immediately and increase long term sales.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson again from DotComSecrets.com and this is the Marketing in Your Car podcast. Today, I'm going to talk about a tool that we've been using like crazy. I would say this year, I bet you this tool makes me more money than anything else that we've had. That tool is called Google Hangouts.

Google Hangouts are like this cool new thing. They're awesome for a lot of reasons. If you haven't been on one yet, Google Hangout is basically, you jump on your webcam and you can have four or five, I think you can have up to ten other people jump on as well. You see all their little webcams. Whoever talks, it shows their video up top and little head shots of the people down below. Then when they talk, it jumps them up. It's pretty cool.

Last night, I was actually interviewed by the Huffington Post through a live Google Hangout. It was me and three other experts who are on there, along with a host. It was a really fun experience because it was just like I was in the studio getting interviewed for the news, except for I was sitting in my bedroom with my laptop, and it was really cool. I saw how they were using it.

They're using it on a big scale. They're actually publishing a live 24 hour a day news show using Google Hangouts. They had a producer and people. It was really exciting, really cool actually. First of all, I want to say anyone who wants to start your own news channel, you can do it with Google Hangouts. These guys, obviously Huffington Post is a huge company but they were able to do it.

They have the same technology we all have. Google Hangouts is completely free so it was pretty cool, but then we're using it in our business in a lot of other ways. Right now, some of you guys know with Rippln we're going to be rolling out, we've been doing tons of Google Hangouts. Everyday, I do a Google Hangout and have everyone on our team bring their teams to the Google Hangout, kind of like back in the day with network marketing companies, they were grown through hotel meetings.

This is kind of like a hotel meeting that we do every single day at noon for 30 minutes. We get people on, get excited, we sign them up, and then the next day, they bring back their friends. We just keep doing this process over and over again. Our team is growing. We're at 26,000 plus this morning and growing like wildfire. It's pretty exciting.

Now, some of the other interesting things, we've been using Google Hangouts also to sell product, a lot of product. In fact, we had this friend and they did a webinar. They put it on for a week ahead of time. They did the webinar, and then on the webinar, they sold $70,000 worth of product. They did pretty well.

Then the next day, they did a Google Hangout. The Hangout was basically just with everybody who had been on the webinar, and it was to answer questions. They sat on there for three or four hours just answering questions, talking to people about it, getting them excited, and ended up almost doubling the sales during the Google Hangout which is pretty amazing.

Then the other exciting thing is Google Hangouts are run like they stream live on YouTube so as soon as the Hangout was over, it was kind of cool because people during the Hangout can ask questions and all that kind of stuff. People were asking questions and they were responding. As soon as they're done, all those questions, all those comments instantly turn into YouTube comments.

The second the video was live, there's 1000 comments that pop in there. It's just amazing that because of the comments, because it's YouTube and because Google wants to award people for doing Google Hangouts right now, they're ranking those videos very, very high. This guy, he had done $70,000 on the live webinar. I think he did a $60,000 on the Google Hangout but that Google Hangout was archived on Google and he was ranked number one for the product name, for what he was selling.

For the next three or four months, people kept searching for that product name and he told me he sold over $50,000 more in stuff from people who would just stumble upon his Google Hangout that is now there and archived for the rest of time and all eternity. It's kind of interesting because he did that work once, and that sales presentation he made will continue to sell for him forever.

Really, that's one of the magical, powerful things about Google Hangouts. After you're done, those things are archived forever and they'll keep closing sales for you 24 hours a day, seven days a week for forever. When you're dead and when your kids are dead, and your grandkids are dead, those things will still be closing sales for you.

It's exciting. For those who have not tried Google Hangouts yet, they're completely free. Just go into your Google Plus account. On the right-hand side, there's a big button that says Hangout. You click on it, boom, you invite some friends to it, you name it, you stream it live, and you can do it. I just recommend jumping in and doing one.

Just do one for fun. I'm going to do one today with just myself on it just to create the video that I can then use in a promotional video. That's the other thing is you make quick promotional videos by making Hangouts. There are a lot of really cool ways to use it but it's by far one of the most powerful tools we've ever used for converting customers, for driving traffic, for sustaining your sales message, and it's a super powerful tool.

If you haven't done a Google Hangout yet, go and do it. I'm at the office right now. I'm going to be doing three or four Hangouts on queue for myself to do today so I'm going to go jump on one right now, and make some money. You guys should be doing it as well. Thanks everybody.

Apr 23, 2013

I hate when people give their opinion on what is good and bad.  The only thing that matters is what works in an actual test.  The writers at TechCrunch need to understand that the only thing that matters in a new company is results… Not what they think is cool.

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson with DotComSecrets.com, and this is the “Marketing in Your Car” podcast. This is the first podcast where I haven’t actually been in my car. I’m actually at my office right now, because today I’m going to go on a little bit of a rant. The title of this rant is “Your Opinion is Irrelevant” [laughs]. The reason why I’m doing this, and you may think I’m upset, but I’m actually really, really excited.

Rippln got written up in “TechCrunch”. TechCrunch is a huge tech blog, and most people dream about having their company, their startup, talked about in TechCrunch. So that was an exciting thing, except for the fact that the TechCrunch articles says, “What Not to Do in Your Startup Promo Video”. Now this made me smile, because I was the one who created the startup promo video. I wrote the copy for it. We got it animated, and we’ve used it to roll out. Now I’m going to read you this article first. I’m going to bleep out the curse words, because he uses a lot of them, but this is what it says.

It says,

“Thanks to my job, I get to see a lot of stupid B.S., most gets filtered out, but every now and then, something just rises up that’s so ridiculously stupid, it’s just begging to be called out. That’s the case with this promotional video from the kind folks at Rippln , which is more or less a two-minute case study for how not to pitch your soon to be ultra-viral app to the general public, or to the press, or to potential employees, or investors.

So, here’s the step-by-step of what not to do in your video. First, don’t tell us your app is going to be viral before it’s even friggin’ released. Second, don’t expect the press to cover your stupid app before it’s been released, except for maybe in posts parodying it. Number three, don’t assume your friends or family members will be talking about it. Likewise, don’t assume strangers will be coming up to you on the friggin’ streets to talk about it. Number four, don’t say your stupid app is going to change the way we communicate, or call it “the biggest breakthrough since e-mail”. Next, don’t promise that your app will change how commerce, either online or off line, is happening – definitely not both. Don’t promise again that your stupid app is going to go viral. Don’t compare its growth to Facebook or Twitter. Don’t pretend to know how people were talking to Mark Zuckerberg in the cafeteria at Harvard or how he would respond. Please don’t bring Adam D’Angelo into this. Also, if you must, don’t say he looks like a thirteen-year old. Don’t try to impress me with Adam D’Angelo’s net worth. Wait, why are we talking about Adam D’Angelo again? Don’t make your stupid app sound like some sort of exclusive club with an inner circle, and talk about how lucky we are to be able to be invited in and “curse word”. VELVET ROPE? INNER CIRCLE? F*, NO. INVITE FIVE LEADERS? WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU? Don’t say there’s a brief window for me to join, but please, if there is, let’s hope this abominable window closes soon, because this startup sucks. Don’t pretend to have trade secrets. Trade secrets? Don’t refer to an NDA when you really mean personal information collecting form to use in our B.S. marketing. Also, who signs an NDA on YouTube? And don’t participate in the general douchebaggery which pretty much describes this entire video.”

When I read that, at first I was kind of upset about it. Then I started thinking about it. I want to show you guys some of the stats, because if you haven’t seen what’s been happening behind the scenes in Rippln, it’s going crazy.

In the first seven days, we had over 150,000 people register for this site by filling out an NDA. Now this is through a manual process. No one has been able to mass-promote it, so it’s kind of cumbersome to even have happen, yet, holy cow, it’s working. Right now, it is growing faster than Facebook or Twitter. Right now, it is going viral. The press is covering it, including TechCrunch [laughs], whether they like it or not. Most people’s friends or family members have talked to them about it, and total strangers have been contacting us about it, as well. Right now, the app is changing how we communicate, so it’s kind of funny that all of these things that he’s angry about have all been prophetic. Every one of these things is happening and has happened.

The fact that there’s this huge divide means that the copy on the video worked perfectly. The goal with copy and with a video is never to unite everyone into your cause. It’s to split people in half. When you split people in half, there is polarity, and polarity is a good thing. It creates an “us versus them” situation, and it’s good, so when all is said and done, he’s giving his opinions about why he does not like the video, yet the video is working. It’s working like crazy. It’s helping this grow out faster than any other tech company, any other startup that I’ve ever seen. Based on our current numbers, projections for month number one, when Rippln goes live, are $100,000,000 in month number one, which is interesting, considering most startups that are featured on TechCrunch don’t make any money. In fact, there’s one guy’s comment down here that I really appreciated, and so I’m going to read them to you guys, too.

He says,

“One of the biggest problems you have in the tech scene is lack of marketing ability. You have people who have amazing products, apps, software, et cetera, but nobody ever hears about them. One of the big reasons behind it is the aversion that people in the Valley seem to have to effective direct marketing. People see that firms like Google and Apple hate direct marketing, so they figure they should, too. Well, Google and Apple both have billions of dollars at hand. They can afford to hate the most cost-effective form of advertising in the world. People are afraid to sell, because they don’t want to look like jerks or douchebags. Well, personally, I feel like more of a douchebag if I couldn’t make the mortgage than I would by aggressively selling to people. Amazing products go undiscovered and companies go broke in the Valley every single year because people are afraid to push the envelope a little bit with marketing. There are billions-of-dollars companies in the Valley that could have an amazing impact on people’s lives, but they will never get the chance, because people in the Valley are afraid to sell.

Anyway, back to my starting point here. In my original post, I acted like a jerk towards the author, and I apologize for that.”

And he goes on about how he’s not a part of Rippln, and blah, blah, blah. Again, I want to come back to how someone can write an article about why something doesn’t work, which this guy’s trying to do, but it’s working. He says, “What Not to Do in Your Startup Promo Video”, and this happens to be the most successful startup promo video in the history of the Internet, and he’s telling us that it’s a bad case study. Yet it’s working perfectly, so I think it’s ironic, and it makes me smile and makes me laugh.

I just want everyone to understand that your opinion does not matter. Right now we’re finishing up our first issue of the new “Dot Com Secrets” lab’s newsletter, which has been all about the split test we ran. In ninety percent of the split tests we ran, I assumed that the other version would win, and I was wrong. Our opinions do not matter. The only thing that matters in the marketing world is what works, and this obviously is working. Today we should pass 200,000 people in Rippln, and again, we are eight days into this thing, so I’d like to see TechCrunch or any of the other companies featured in TechCrunch do something that’s even close to that with their startup videos. Yeah, it’s not going to happen.

So if you want an example of good copy and what’s working, and you don’t care about your opinion, you just care about what actually works in this world, check out the Rippln NDA video, or just go to TechCrunch and read their article, and tell them your opinion about the fact that, “Your opinion doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is results, and, holy crap, this is getting results.”

So there’s my rant, you guys. Don’t be shy about your marketing. You’re right. They’re wrong. Do whatever works. That’s how you’re going to change the world. You don’t change the world by being scared of selling and by hiding behind fancy company names and a bunch of other crap like that. There’s my opinion. I hope you agree with it. If not, I don’t really care, because, again, your opinion doesn’t matter in this situation. The only thing that matters is what works, and this is working like crazy.

I appreciate you guys. If you liked this podcast, please tell your friends about it, and also, I’d love if you would leave any feedback on our channel. We’re trying to get some more feedback, because we’re a brand-new podcast, but we’re having fun so far, and we’ll talk soon. Thanks, everybody.

Apr 19, 2013

Want an idea for a business reality show that would actually be worth watching?

---Transcript---

Hello, everyone. This is Russell Brunson from DotComSecrets.com, and this is the “Marketing from Your Car” podcast. I’m on my way to the office right now, and I wanted to make you guys a podcast. I guess this is a bit of a rant, a little bit.

Recently I’ve been watching TIVO’d episodes of my favorite shows [laughs], and I’m sure you guys know how it is. You record them all, and when you actually have the time then you watch one and knock it out. I just watched one of the most recent “Celebrity Apprentice” episodes. My first rant is that I wish they’d get rid of Celebrity Apprentice and go back to the real “Apprentice”, because that show was a lot better.

But even with that, this is my real frustration with that show. If you guys ever watch it, each week they have two different teams. The teams get different tasks, and what’s interesting is that the way they choose the winners is, basically Donald Trump – or they’ll get a company, like they had Australian Gold Suntan Lotion on this the last one I was watching. They each get to make a commercial for the company, and then they pick the winner based on whose commercial they like more. As a direct response marketer, that drives me crazy, because it’s not based on what converts more, or what makes you more money, it’s based on one person’s opinion.

It makes me laugh, because we’ve been doing a lot of testing lately in our company, and most of the times, the test that I think is going to win, loses. It’s really interesting. In fact, there’s a site called WhichTestWon.com. It’s really a fascinating site. Every day they give out different tests, and they show the “A” and the “B” – the split tests, and you get to vote on which one you think is going to win. Ninety percent of the time, we pick the wrong one. I’m somebody who’s been in this business for a long time. I’ve had my head in this more than most people, and we still don’t pick it right. What drives me crazy is that they base those tasks not on performance or on anything, it’s based on which one we like better.

If we were going to make a show that was actually legit and actually was a good show, they should do it like “Pitchman”. I don’t know if anybody’s ever seen Pitchman before. I believe Billy Mays passed away. That show was awesome. What they would do at the beginning of the show would be to pick five or six different products that they wanted to make infomercials for, and they’d narrow it down to two or three. They would show the process of making an infomercial and filming it and all that kind of stuff.

Then what they did, and this is the cool part, is they’d actually take that infomercial, and they’d air it live. They’d air all of them. They’d give them a $20,000 test budget, and they’d test all three of them. Then they’d come back afterwards, and they would show the results. They would call each person. It was cool. They would call each person up on the phone and say, “Hey, we ran your show and [pauses] unfortunately the numbers didn’t back it up. It’s not going to be a winner,” or they’d call them up and say, “Hey, just so you know, we went three times over on the front end. You’ve got a winner. Congratulations, you’ll be a millionaire within six months,” that kind of thing. It was, “That’s awesome. That’s exciting.”

That’s something to get motivated by versus, “Hey, Gary Busey made a commercial and he didn’t have a hero shot in it, so he lost.” –“Seriously? Who says a hero shot is going to get anything to convert better or make more money at all?” It just fascinates me, and so I just want all of us to be thinking about that.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m addicted to ads. I’m addicted to watching what’s happening on TV and on the radio. It’s fun for me to watch, not because I care about the creative part of it, but because I care about what’s going to work. What can I pull from that and use in my own advertising? We need to become accountable to our ads. If we’re not, and we want to pull them and make a Donald Trump and just throw crap out there, we have no idea what’s actually going to happen.

I had a chance to go to a Super Conference, one of Dan Kennedy’s Super Conferences, and they had a guy named – I think his name was Lenny Liebermann. He’s one of the owners or the founders or partners – I’m not sure which, in – what’s that company? They have the skincare stuff for night. That’s funny. I’m going to blank out right now. It’s a billion dollar brand. I can't remember what it is now. Anyway, it's all of this skincare. You can wash your face, and you get rid of acne and zits, and all of that kind of stuff, and I respect that company so much. But what's interesting about that is they are $1 billion brand, and he said, “We never will run any type of advertising where we can't track the ROI. Believe me, it's been so tempting at times, where in the playoffs they want you to rent the backboard and things like that, or they want you to buy an ad here and there. If we can't track the results, we will not spend money on it,” and that's why they've grown to a billion-dollar brand.

They're one of the few brands that I actually respect, because they're doing it the right way. They are not like a lot of the brands out there that you see that have, "Here're our advertising budgets. We have $4 million for the year. Blow it on whatever you want," which is how most of these guys’ budgets work. That's how Burger King, McDonald's, all of those are. There's no accountability whatsoever. It's just, "Hey, let's spend some money on ads," and that's just fascinating to me.

I just want us all to realize that as direct response marketers, that's what matters – what converts better or not. It’s not, “What do you like better, or what's prettier, or what does your mom or dad think is cool, or what Donald Trump thinks looks the best?” It's what actually is going to convert better when you put it out there in the marketplace.

I think it would be a lot better show if that's how it ran – where everyone makes their ad. They run it, see who wins, and go from there. In fact, that's a good idea for a reality show. If any of you guys want to do that, that's the game plan – basically make an infomercial. Do the whole concept of getting two teams and having them each build an infomercial, run some media, and see which one wins. That would actually be a fascinating show. It would be fun to watch, because then you could dissect it. –“Why did this one win? Why is this one better?” As opposed to, "Oh, the executives thought this was cooler [laughs].”

Anyway, that's my thoughts on it. If anyone wants to make that reality show, let me know. I'll be part of it. It would be awesome. It would be a lot of fun.

That's it for today, guys. I'm at the office. I hope you guys enjoyed this, and please leave comments down below. We'd love to hear back if you like the show, or if you have any ideas or topics you want me to discuss on my drive in. We'll talk to you all soon.

Apr 18, 2013

On this episode, Russell talks about his 8 hour marathon hangout and the ONLY thing you need to get your business to 7 figures a year.

---Transcript---

Hey, everybody. This is Russell Brunson from the “Marketing in Your Car” podcast at DotComSecrets.com. Right now, I’m actually headed to the gym, because I don’t want to go the gym this afternoon, so I’m going this morning [laughs]. This is actually the “Marketing on Your Way to the Gym” podcast this morning. It’s been a couple of day since I did a podcast, mostly – oh, I just hit a squirrel. Oh, he survived. Good, he missed me [laughs]. That was close.

I’ve been gone. I was out of town, in Dallas, because there’s a new network marketing company launching. I’ve spent the last seven months or so building out all of their sales processes, and scripting their videos, and all of that kind of fun stuff with it. They actually went live on Saturday, so it’s been kind of a whirlwind nightmare and exciting all at the same time. I’m sure that if you were on Facebook or on Twitter that you have been pounded by it, which is probably kind of annoying to some people, but it’s a good thing from my standpoint, because the word is out, it’s growing fast. It’s on the first leg. This is Tuesday morning, so it’s been live basically two and a half days. We’ve had over 35,000 people sign the NDA to find out what it is, and it's been exciting watching it. It's just growing like wildfire. I’ve had messages from people trying to get close to me. My voice is on all of the videos, so it kind of makes me laugh.

What was interesting, and what I want to talk about today is that there is a really good book written by Michael Masterson called “Ready, Fire, Aim”. In that book he talks about the skill sets and the things that you need for a business going from zero to a million dollars in a year, from a million to ten, from ten to fifty, and from fifty to a hundred. For most of us, we are not going to get past the ten million dollar mark. You might, but for me, I don't even want to. We got to ten million dollars once, and it was kind of a nightmare to manage.

But anyway, it was interesting – the skill set to go from zero to a million dollars – the whole book is funny. Most people will be focusing on getting the website perfect, getting their office set up, hiring the right staff and all of this stuff. He’s like, “The only thing that matters, if you want to go from zero to a million dollars, is sales. Sales are the only thing that matters. Getting in there, and cutting your teeth, and just selling, selling, selling, selling.” If you're going to read that book, it brings you back to that, because in all of our businesses, we make money when we sell. Most of us, when we start our businesses, if we’re entrepreneurs, that's how we get our start. It’s us out there selling and doing our best, and then somewhere when we start growing, we get away from that. I know for me, we always come back to that. When everything starts getting going down a little bit, you can come back and sell, and, “Boom,” it brings it back up.

Selling obviously is happening in a lot of different formats. You’ve sales letters, webinars, tele-seminars, videos. There are so many fun ways to sell online. Yesterday I did a kind of a fun experiment. Because this whole new company is launching, and we want to get a bunch of market share as quickly as we can to get a lot of people on our team, we decided to do a big huge Google hangout yesterday. We ended up doing Google Hangout for six or seven hours long. I can't remember. I was beat up by the end of it, but basically we got me and four or five other people on it, and we put it out to our list. For six or seven hours, we did this huge long hangout, closing people one at a time on why they should sign the NDA. It was actually really fun. It felt almost like we were on PBS – one of those telethons, because we'd be on there and get people to text us their information. We'd go and we'd fill out the form, and say, "congratulations, Mike. You just made it in. Go sign the NDA. Okay, so and so, I just got your text. We're doing you next."

Everyone was going back and forth, and there was a lot of energy in our office. It was really fun. But it reminded me about getting back to the roots of selling. We put everything else on hold the entire day, and did nothing but have our entire team all selling for the entire day. I look at – you know most days in the office, I'm working on a project. They're working on their little thing, and things slowly move forward, but the times we make huge jumps is when everybody’s selling. The energy in the room is from when all of that stuff is happening at once.

I think that in my company, we're going to do another telethon today, which is going to be fun. I would really set it up at least once a month where you get everyone on your team selling – something in place where that's the mindset and the culture of everyone – that selling is the most important thing. It's the lifeblood of our team. Whether it is, if you have an e-mail list, you sending an e-mail out to your list and having people calling in, or something that causes that to happen. You can get everyone on your team doing that. When you do it, it brings your team closer. Everyone understands that the way that they make money and get paid is by selling, and it just changes the culture a little bit.

Yesterday was such a neat, magical day. By the end of it, we were all tired and beat up, and we all just wanted to go home and crash, but that experience bonded us altogether, and I think it was really neat. That's what I recommend.

Again, first off, I'd go read Michael Masterson's book, "Ready, Fire, Aim", and even if you just read the chapters, the beginning two or three chapters, where it talks about going from zero to million dollars a year, that stuff is powerful, and it will get you back into the mindset of selling, selling, selling. Then do that with your team. Do that if it's just you. If you're a one person team, figure out a way you can just sit down and sell all day long, because when you start selling, you’re going to see what works, what doesn't work and it's by far the best way to start growing. If you have an existing business relationship, it will really expand if you just get back into the sales mindset.

That's about it for today. I just wanted to mention all of that stuff. That's what's going on in my life and at the top of my mind right now. I'm at my gym now, so I'm going to go. I appreciate you guys. If you enjoyed this podcast at all, please comment on it. I think I need a couple of more comments, and then I can actually get some stars showing on this thing which would be exciting. All right, talk to ya soon guys.

Apr 10, 2013

“If you haven’t offended someone by noon each day, then you aren’t marketing hard enough…” -Dan Kennedy

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson from DotComSecrets.com, and this is the “Marketing in Your Car” podcast. I’m actually heading to the office right now. It’s a little early today, because I’ve got a fun project I’m working on, and I wanted to get started before anyone else showed up.

Today I wanted to talk about something that hit me last night. The title of this podcast would be what we call “Dealing with the Haters.” If you guys watch “The Office,” which is wrapping up its last season, this week they had an episode where, they’ve been filming The Office for the last ten years as a being kind of like a reality show, and they released the trailer of that reality show on YouTube.

It was funny, because after they released it, all of these comments started coming in. One of the people mentions Andy Bernard and says, “Andy, are you the guy playing the banjo at minute 6:31? That guy is awesome.” He gets all excited and starts commenting back to people, and then when he does, someone comes back and says, “No, he’s not. He’s not cool. He’s stupid. We hate him,” and Andy takes this so personally. He’s like, “Arg!” and he starts responding back, and then the guy’s responding back to him, and there’s a big huge fight that’s going back and forth. Andy makes all of these personal response videos, and the people that hate him are going back and forth with him. It’s just the funniest thing how he deals with all of the people that hate him [laughs] and how it affected him so much.

I know what he’s talking about, because I had something like that happen last night, at the end of my day, and it just kind of put me in the wrong mood for a while. Now it actually got me into an even better mood today, because I had someone that sent me – and I get stuff like that. Anyone who’s out there, you’re going to get hate mail every once in a while, and I got some yesterday. Usually I don’t see that kind of stuff, but somehow they got to my personal e-mail inbox and so it really frustrated me.

Anyway, it was interesting because stuff like that used to really, really be hard for me. In fact, I used to do all of my own customer support, and there was a time when I was ready to just quit because I’m like, “I’m out here serving, and doing my best, and trying to help people as much as I can, and people are sending me hate mail. I don’t get it.”

I remember I had a mentor named Dan Kennedy, and I heard him say something once that really helped me a lot, so I’m putting this out here for you guys. If you’re in the limelight at all with your business, you’re going to get some of this. Dan Kennedy said that if you haven’t offended somebody by noon every day, then you’re not marketing hard enough. When he said that, it really gave me permission to blow those people off, and I want to give you guys that same permission.

When I was working with Tony Robbins, one thing he said to me was really interesting He said that there’s two ways to build the tallest building in town. The first way is to go out there and put a lot of sweat and effort and all of this stuff into something, and build the tallest building in town. The second way is to go around to everybody else’s buildings and knock them down, and that way you’re the tallest one.

That’s really the way that people are. Most people do not want to go out there and work their butts off to build the tallest building. They want to go and tear everybody else’s down because it makes them feel bigger, and that’s kind of how I felt with this thing yesterday. It was funny. They guy sent a nasty e-mail, “F-bomb this,” and what a horrible scumbag I am and all sorts of stuff. At first I couldn’t figure it out, like, “Who in the world is this guy?” I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. Finally I realized that he was commenting on a promotion we did.

For those who are on some of our lists, we did this really cool local marketing webinar series where we had seven of the top local marketing experts in the world come on and basically show you exactly what they did in their business, and reveal the behind the scenes and show everything. They did each one of them like a two- or a three-hour webinar, so in all we had twenty hours of webinars. People could get on the webinars for free when they were live, and then at the end of the webinar, some of the speakers sold stuff, which is obviously how we monetized it.

What we did is we offered replays. –“We’re not showing anybody the replays, so if you want the replay, you’ve got to pay for it. It’s $97. You get the replay of all seven events, then you can go back and you can rewind it, you can listen to it, and learn all kinds of stuff. Plus as an extra bonus, I’m going to transcribe all seven of these events, so if you’re the kind of person that likes to read along, you can have the transcripts with it.”

I thought it was a good offer. I think for someone like me, I’d be like, “Man, if I can hear twenty hours of people doing the business that I want to be doing or the business that I am doing – seven people, some of the best in the world, and then I can actually have replays. I can watch it over and over and over again, and I can read the transcripts. That’s valuable to me.”

And so we priced it at $97, which I thought was a steal, and that’s what this guy was so upset about, saying basically, “How in the world dare you sell something digital for $97 where people can just... It’s something that’s just streaming off of your website. You shouldn’t be doing that,” and on and on and on and on. I was just shocked, and again, it really offended me at first. Then last night and this morning as I was getting ready, I was like, “You know what? He’s coming in and trying to knock down the tallest building in town. Why doesn’t he go out and provide his own value? Why doesn’t he go out and do something, as opposed to coming in here and just yelling at me and other people?”

It made me feel a little bit better, so I wanted to give you guys permission, right now, that if you get hate mail, if you get people that are upset or frustrated, don’t pull an Andy Bernard. Don’t go and complain and fight back and comment back on YouTube videos and stuff like that. Just ignore it, and then give yourself permission, like I said, from Dan Kennedy, “If you haven’t offended somebody by noon each day, you’re not marketing hard enough.” Let me give you that permission to go out there and do what you need to do. Just stop focusing on the people that don’t like you, and focus on the people that you’re serving. Focus on people whose lives are changing because of the good, the value, and the things you’re putting out there in the world.

We had over 10,000 people register for that webinar series. We’ve got hundreds of people sending e-mails and thanking us and success stories and all sorts of stuff coming in from it, and then there’s one dude who’s upset because we’re selling the replays. Don’t focus on the one dude that’s going to make you upset. Be grateful that you upset him, because that means you’re working hard. Focus on the people who love you. Focus on providing value to them.

I hope that helps you guys, and that’s about it. I’m at the office. I’ve got a fun day ahead of me today, so I’m excited. I hope you guys do, as well. If not, find a new job. Find a new line of work. Do something that you’re so passionate about. Right now, at 6:25 in the morning – I woke up early today, because I’m so excited to come in and start working on this project. Find something you’re that passionate about, and if you’re not yet, just go out there and seek it. You don’t have to do whatever you’re doing right now.

I have a close friend of mine who I love and care about a lot. He told me flat out, “This is what I wish I could do with my life,” and I said, “Why don’t you do that?” He said, “Well, I can’t because this.” He always had an excuse for why he couldn’t do it. He said, “I used to envy you, Russell, because you go out there, and you just do whatever you want to do.” I’m like, “Why don’t you just do it? It’s just a choice. You just have to do it.”

Figure out what you want to do. I ask myself probably once a month, “What do I want to be when I grow up?” and then I go and I work towards that. That’s a good thing to do –“What do you want to be when you grow up?” If you’re not passionate and in love with whatever it is that you’re doing, figure out what you want to be when you grow up, and go and do it. Just quit everything else and focus on that. Well, don’t quit everything else – obviously you’ve got to pay the bills. If you’re doing something, you know you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, but work your face off to get towards whatever it is you want to be doing when you grow up, because this life is way too short to not do that.

Anyway, I appreciate you guys. If you liked this podcast at all, please comment on it. We’re six or seven episodes into this thing. , I think, and trying to get iTunes to give us some love. They ranked us on the first page. This is really cool. I was on iTunes the other day, and I was scrolling through the home page, and our podcast was in there, so congratulations, you guys, the listeners. We’ve got people listening, which is exciting. I just need you to go and review it so that we can get some stars in there and people on iTunes can find us. I appreciate you guys, and I will talk to you all tomorrow.

Apr 9, 2013

Russell talks about how fast a new idea went viral when it was locked behind NDA’s…

---Transcript---

Hey, this is Russell Brunson with the “Marketing in Your Car” podcast from DotComSecrets.com. I am actually driving home from work today. I’ve had a really fun experience, and I want to share, because I think there’s some value in it for everybody.

This is what I want to talk about –the power of secrets [laughs]. Our company name is “Dot Com Secrets”, and I remember at one of my events that I did, I was telling someone, “Find some secrets, and that’s what you should be selling.” Someone told me, “We hate the word ‘secrets’. We want to change it to ‘strategies’.” I’m like, “You can do that, but secrets works.”

So here’s some more proof that the whole secretive concept is awesome. I do webinars, and we’ll promote them to our list of half a million people. From that, I might get five thousand people to register for a webinar, which is great. We make a lot of money with 5,000 people on a webinar. Last night, or actually it was two nights ago, we did a webinar, and this one I didn’t promote. I personally texted a couple of people, and I said, “Hey, this is this thing I’m doing. We’re rolling out this new app. It’s going to be really cool, and you may want to be part of it. I’m doing a secret webinar. If you want to come to it, show up.” That was my text, and there was a link to register for the webinar. I only sent it out to maybe twenty people. I had two of my friends send it out. Between all three of us, we maybe sent it out to fifty people – maybe, but probably not even that many, and we specifically said, “Do not tell anybody else about this. This is just for you.”

That night, we had over a hundred people register for the webinar, and about eighty-five of them showed up. Almost everyone showed up, and it was interesting because I was like, “Man, I specifically told you not to invite anybody, but you invited five people.” Each of them did, and it was interesting. We’re doing another one tonight, and it’s been amazing to watch how fast something grows when they’re not supposed to tell anybody about it. And it’s funny.

There’s this new network marketing company rolling out, and they hired me to come and do the sales process and the scripts and stuff. It’s kind of fun. I’ve never been on the inside of a network marketing company to see how something like that rolls out, and how the whole process works, but they are some of the best at using this concept. They’re rolling it out in about two weeks from now, and they’ve been telling people, “Don’t tell anyone about it. Don’t tell anyone about that,” and so specifically nobody’s been able to tell anyone. To learn anything about it, you have to sign an NDA to find out about it.

They’re doing this event in a week from now. Nobody knows what it is still, but they have to pay to come to this event, and they’ve got twenty-five hundred paid people coming to this event without knowing what it is. All they know is they can’t tell anybody, so it’s this interesting...I almost just hit a squirrel. You guys who are listening in live while I’m driving, I barely just missed a squirrel [laughs]. Anyway, it’s interesting the power behind that.

I saw one guy do this with a webinar. It was Trey Smith, in the app industry. He does the same thing. –“I’m doing this webinar. It’s so secretive. If you want to know what it is, you’ve got to sign an NDA.” I don’t know his numbers, but I’m sure his turnout rate was amazing and the sales rates were amazing.

Figure out how you can use that in your business. Figure out if you want to do an event for whatever it is you’re doing – a new rollout of a new product, or a new project, or a new whatever. I promise you, if you tell people that it’s a secret and that they can’t tell anyone else, magically the word of mouth will start working, whereas if you ask somebody, and you bribe someone and you say, “Hey, I’ll pay you twenty bucks to tell your friends,” a lot of times the referral marketing stops there. They don’t tell their friends, but you tell them not to tell anybody and it’s amazing what happens, so that’s kind of an interesting concept.

I’m sure you guys can use that in a lot of different spots in your business. I’m seeing the power of it right now, and it’s fantastic and really exciting. In fact, with the rollout of this network marketing company, their goal is to get a hundred thousand people on NDAs before it ever goes live – a hundred thousand people to sign an NDA to find out about something that they can’t tell anyone else about. That’s the interesting. It’s a powerful strategy, so I hope you guys can use that. I’m going to be using it, and you will see it coming from me in my marketing in the very near future.

Thanks, everybody. Oh yeah, and to end with, I learned from somebody who actually does podcasts a lot that you should always tell people on your podcast to go and to rate your show, so if you’ve like anything you’ve learned so far, please go back to iTunes and rate it. I would appreciate it. This is still a kind of a new project for me, but I’ve noticed we’re in the top, I think, eighty-sixth new and hot podcasts, so we’re rising in the ranks, you guys, so if you’ve enjoyed this at all, or enjoyed any of them, please go and leave some feedback. It would be much appreciated, and I’ll talk to you guys again tomorrow. All right, ‘bye.

Apr 4, 2013

During this podcast you’ll learn the difference between a $100 a month client and a $50,000 a month client (and the funny thing is the work for both is the SAME!)

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson again with the “Marketing in Your Car” podcast from DotComSecrets.com. Normally I do these podcasts when I’m driving to work in the morning, but I didn't this morning. Right now, I’m just out driving around actually. I had a cool experience happen today that I wanted to share, because I thought it would be a good lesson for everyone.

I had a chance to go to lunch today with a guy here locally in Boise who does local marketing on a really big scale. He’s a really neat guy. It’s funny, because he’s been in Boise for two years, and I've never even bumped into him or met him. It’s always unique and fun when you meet someone who’s in the same business as what we’re doing. I met with him, had lunch with him, and I had a great time.

I had one take-away at the very end of the conversation that really just jumped out to me. He said, “Russell, there’s no money in local marketing, going to businesses that are B2C. That’s what most people are focusing on. If they’re a local consultant, they’re going after chiropractors, dentists, and things like that. I focus, one hundred percent, on B2B companies. With those kinds of clients, what’s interesting is that basically – let’s say you have a client, and they sell a widget. Maybe for that widget they've got, they've got five or six customers total, but those five or six customers make them $5 million a year. I come in, and I start to work with those kinds of clients. I just have to get them one new client, and when I do, that’s worth a million dollars to them, and so for that, I take a percentage, so maybe $100,000 a year.”

He had one client. –“I have all year to focus on just getting them one client. In that kind of business, you don’t have to worry about SEO, PPC, social media, any of that kind of stuff. All you focus on is getting them another client through whatever means necessary,” and I thought, “Man, that’s interesting. Everyone’s going after these smaller businesses, and obviously people are making money with it, but that’s the hustle – going after smaller businesses, where this guy is doing the exact same business. He’s just focusing on a different market, and he’s got a lot less clients and making a lot more money.”

Anyway, just kind of a big “aha” for me, and it made me think about how in my own business, I’m always sharing stuff with small businesses. That’s been my passion – helping small businesses grow. Then I look at someone like Gary Vaynerchuk, who’s a mentor of mine, and a really neat guy. Gary teaches very similar stuff to what I do. I don’t think he teaches it as well, and I don’t think he executes it as well, to be honest. But one thing that Gary does is he focuses on bigger clients. His average client, I think, pays thirty to fifty thousand dollars a month, where my average clients – our high-end clients are like ten grand a month. It’s just interesting. He’s doing the exact same thing I’m doing. He’s probably not working as hard as I am, but he’s going after a bigger market and a bigger client, and I just thought it was really interesting.

For all of you guys out there, including myself, this was a wake-up call for me today. Just look at who you’re targeting. Who are the customers that you’re going after? Just by shifting who you go after – who else? Just think about this right now. Who else would your product or service help? Think about that. What if you targeted them, instead of just the people you’re currently targeting? Like Gary Vaynerchuk, go and land one client. –“Boom.” You’re making fifty grand a month. This guy I had lunch with today, his name’s Diego. Go out like him, and, “Boom.” Get a client, and get $100,000 contract to get one new client.

We’re all doing the same amount of work anyway. We might as well get paid what we deserve, and so target bigger customers, whatever business you are in. A lot of you guys are selling different things, but just think about that. Right now, if you’re not going after the customer you keep focusing on, who would that new customer be? Hopefully that will be some food for thought for all of you guys. I know it was for me today. It gave me a big wake-up call and got me excited to start looking at my business and start re-picking my target market. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

I hope you guys liked this, and I will talk to you guys again probably tomorrow morning. Have a great night.

Apr 1, 2013

You’ve heard the #1 reason you succeed or fail in real estate is “Location, Location, Location,” but what is the #1 reason when you’re online…?

---Transcript---

Good morning, everyone. This is Russell Brunson again, from the DotComSecrets.com “Marketing in Your Car” podcast. For me, the weekend just ended. I hope everyone had a great weekend. I’m rebounding from winter today, and I’m actually wearing shorts to work, so I’m excited.

I want to talk about something that’s on my mind a lot. We had Easter break this weekend, so my family and I went down to where my wife’s parents live. It’s interesting. We live in Boise, Idaho, which isn’t a huge town, but it’s a good-sized town. We drove down two and a half hours to a city called Burley, which is where my wife’s family is from. It’s a lot smaller town, and from there we drove out to a smaller city called Alpine, which has about five hundred people. From there we drove out to this city called Almo, which I think has about eight people in the whole city, and that’s not really exaggerating all that much – literally eight people.

I had some interesting thoughts along the way. First off, we were driving down to Burley, and on the side of the freeway, there’s this hill. I’ve seen this every time we drive by it, and I’ve always wondered what it is. It’s this huge hill, strangely huge, and it looks like something that just popped up out in the middle of nowhere. They have these two huge waterslides coming off of one side, and a zip line that comes off the other side. It’s on the side of the freeway, out in the middle of nowhere. There’s no city within fifteen miles of there – it’s just this random, weird thing. I keep thinking, “What is that?” I always want to stop and go water-sliding down it, but you’ve never see anyone there. It’s just this random thing.

That was the first thing we saw, and then we went out to Almo, which again, is this little podunk city, literally, with a population of eight or nine. We’re driving out there, and all of the sudden, there’s this huge hotel. That’s where we stayed. We called every night for an entire week before someone answered the phone. We were driving down there, literally, and someone finally answered the phone, and they go, “Oh yeah, we’ve got tons of rooms. Come stay.” We go and stay at this place. We’re the only people staying there. There’s nobody else. It’s just interesting.

My brother-in-law was down there with us. We were hanging out with him. His family owns one of the local banks, and he told me that both of those projects – the big huge hill on the side of the road – that the people had come in and tried to finance with them. They turned them down, because they said, “Look, nobody is going to go to a random water slide on the side of the freeway where there’re no exits close by [laughs]. There’s no city.” They turned the guy down. The guy was all excited. He was so passionate. He knew it would be huge, so he went and borrowed money from his friends and family, built this huge waterslide thing, and apparently it went bankrupt because nobody could even get to it. Literally, there’s not an exit close by. I don’t know how you’d even get to it.

The other one was this little hotel in the middle of the desert that the bank actually did finance. There’re probably twenty rooms or so. There’re more rooms in this hotel than there are people in the city, and it’s not like there’s a tourist spot close. It got me really thinking about how so many times, we get passionate about an idea, and we think it’s the greatest thing in the world, so we go and we dump all of this money and time and effort into something when there’s nobody around. In the real estate days, they used to always say that the most important thing about real estate is “location, location, location.” I remember hearing that from my dad when I was a kid. Now obviously for this, these guys built a waterslide hill on the side of the freeway – horrible location. Nobody shows up. Bankrupt. These other guys found this little city with a population of eight and decided it would be a great spot for a hotel. The spent probably a million bucks building this hotel, and guess what? Nobody shows up. Location, location, location.

So how does that relate to you guys? When we used to do our big high-end seminars – some of you guys probably came to them. We used to do seminars where we would charge between five and ten thousand dollars for people to come to our office in Boise. We’d spend three days working on their business, and I’d say half of the time, if not more, people would come to these businesses, that they weren’t businesses – there was no market. One guy I remember vividly. I felt bad for the guy. He spent ten grand to come. I tried to talk him out of it, but he kept telling me, “I want to create a product to sell to Boy Scout leaders, because there’re X amount of Boy Scout leaders across America, blah, blah, blah. Nobody else is tapping into this market,” and I said, “The reason no one taps into it is because there’s not a market there. Boy Scout leaders usually aren’t really getting paid for that. They’re volunteers. They’re not going to spend their own hard-earned money to go and buy more stuff to learn how to become a better Scout Master, unfortunately. I wish they would, but they just don’t. It doesn’t really go hand-in-hand.”

The way I look at this is, in the real estate world, its location, location, location. In our world, it’s, “You’ve got to find a hot market ahead of time.” I luckily learned this lesson early on when I bought a product from Frank Kern and Ed Dale called “The Underachiever Method”. In fact, two years ago I bought that whole company, and I bought that brand from them because I was so passionate about it. I still am. We’re going to be publishing it as a book and a bunch of other really cool stuff here in the near future.

One of the core things they taught in The Underachievers Method was that there’re basically three steps. Step number one is to find a hot market. Step number two is to ask them what they want. Step number three is to give it to them. So many of us go around and do it backwards, where we will have an idea for a product. We go and create the product. We spend time and energy and money and effort creating the product, and then we go and try to sell it, and ninety percent of the time, there’s no market there.

In my business, we’ve been really trying to reverse engineer it, and go the other way. Find the hot market first, find out what they want, and then create it. That’s how we found our diabetic supplement. We went out there – and I don’t know anything about diabetes. In fact, ours is a niche within diabetes. It’s neuropathy. I don’t know anything about neuropathy, but we were able to find out that there’s a market there. People are buying stuff, and so we went, and we found out what they wanted. They wanted a natural supplement, and so, “Boom,” we created it.

We did it the correct way. Find a hot market. Ask them what they want, and then give it to them, as opposed to what most of us do, which is have a product idea, create it, and then go try and shove it down people’s throats. For people that are doing that, you’re just like that dude on the side of the road with the huge waterslide, and nobody’s around. It’s important to sell stuff you’re passionate about, but that’s not the first step. The first step is to find that market. Find the group of rabid, hungry buyers first, and after you’ve found it, then, again, it’s not like you go and create something. Find out what they want. Ask them questions.

If you find that existing traffic stream, you can put up what we used to call fly catcher pages. We’d put up a little page, and say, “What’s your number one question about this topic? What’s the most important thing? What’s the number one thing you’re trying to do? The number one struggle with your diabetes?” or whatever it might be. You ask people that, and they let you know, and then you create the product. Just like in real estate, it’s location, location, location. In Internet marketing world, it’s find a hot market – the market, the market, the market.

So I just want to encourage you guys that wherever you are in your path right now, if you haven’t started yet, make sure that you’re doing it the right way. Find the hot market first. If you already have a business, and you’re trying to grow it, go out there and start looking for those markets. Go and find the place that there’re already people at and set up shop there.

Another thing – we were in Albion, and these guys were building this beautiful bed and breakfast, out in Albion, Idaho, population, again, three hundred or something like that. I was like, “Why? You’ve got to spend the same amount of money building a bed and breakfast in Albion as you would in Boise. Why wouldn’t you build in Boise where people are actually at, and people are visiting and traveling to?” I think the only visitors to Albion each year are my wife and I, because we have family there, but most people aren’t going to Albion. It’s going to be very difficult to keep that bed and breakfast busy all year round, but for whatever reason, people fall so in love with the idea, they fall in love with the location, that they do crazy things that just don’t make sense logically from a business standpoint.

For you, I want you guys to be thinking logically. I don’t want you to fall in love with a product. You can fall in love with a market, because you know that there’s so much traffic, there’s so much business, and so many people there, and if you do that, then you’re going to be fine, but if you go about it the other way around, and you spend all of your effort building the most perfect product in the world and hope that there’s a market later, you’re going to be sorely disappointed when you find out that you’ve spend a lot of time and a lot of energy.

That is my rant for today. I’m now at my office. I’m planning to have a really exciting day today, so I hope you guys enjoyed this and I hope that you got some value out of it, and we will talk to you guys all soon.

Mar 29, 2013

Do you struggle to get stuff done each day?  Russell talks about how to shut off active communication, switch to passive communication and how it can make you 200 – 300% more productive every day!

---Transcript---

Hey everyone. This is Russell, and I am actually going in tonight to the office. It is almost nine o’clock at night, but I’m working a late night tonight, because sometimes that’s what you've got to do. I’m going out of town tomorrow with my family and so I’m heading out to a late night session at the office to get some stuff done so I can take a couple of days off and goof off with family

I've been thinking about something a lot today, and I've been ranting with some of the guys who work for me about it. I just wanted to get everyone’s perspective on this and put it out there. When I first got into this business, one of my early mentors was Dan Kennedy, and I went through his time management course [laughs], which is different than most time management courses. If you've ever gone through it, he talks about time vampires and how to distance yourself from customers or anyone who wants to suck your time.

For example [laughs], with Dan, if you want to get hold of him, you have to fax his assistant. Once a week his assistant collects all the faxes, puts them in a FedEx box and FedExes it to Dan. When Dan gets it, he then writes his responses on the faxes and then shoves them back in the FedEx box and FedExes them back to his assistant. His assistant actually will respond back to each person who contacted him, so [laughs], if you’re going to ask him a question, it’s a two-week process. It may be annoying on your side trying to get hold of him, but it also makes you, when you ask questions, very, very efficient.

That’s my biggest issue with phone calls. I hate phone calls. You can ask anybody [laughs]. I hate answering the phone. The only person I answer the phone for is my wife. On the phone, everyone wants to be like, “Hey, how’s it going?” They try to catch up, and twenty minutes into this conversation, they finally get around to what they’re going to ask you.

Then e-mail came around, and at first, the way e-mail worked is we just told people what we wanted, they responded back, and it was great. But now e-mail has become so informal that to write an e-mail, I've got to go through this chitchat – the same stuff I've got to do on a phone call. It takes so much time and energy.

Then text messaging came out. I love texting, because I can text people and the response is really quick. There’s a new app I've been using called Vox which is great, because I can Vox somebody and leave a message, and then when they get it, they can respond back to me. If I have time, I can respond back.

I really like that type of communication. I hate active communication, where we have to be actively engaged, because it takes me and you having to be stopping everything we’re doing at the same time to connect and have that conversation. It’s so inefficient for me. It drives me crazy. A lot of people ask me, “Russell, how in the world do you run twelve companies. How do you do all this kind of stuff?” The way I do it is because I don’t have inefficient communication.

My people on Skype – I try to train people I work with and it’s very difficult, because they don’t understand. If you’re on Skype and you message me it will be like, “Hi.” –“Hi.” –“Hi.” I will never respond back to a “Hi”. If they leave me a question, I will respond back with the answer next time I’m on, but I hate the active communication, because it opens up a door that wastes so much time. It makes you so inefficient. If I’m respond back to someone who skyped me, “Hi,” it would become at least a ten minute conversation, talking about the weather and everything else before we got to the point.

For me, for time management, for example – I want you guys thinking about this, too – how can you shift your communication? To set active communication, where you’re sitting there talking in dialog with somebody, to inactive, where they send you messages and you respond on your time, kind of how e-mail used to be.

The tool that I’m using when I do that is Skype, for the most part. I’m still struggling to train some of people whom I work with on that, but that way you message me on Skype. When I am ready to focus on that project, I will find that thing, and I will respond back to them on that topic. Text messaging is still great, because of that. Voxer, if you haven’t downloaded the Voxer app, it’s great. I can leave voice mail. It’s almost like a voice walkie-talkie text message. I text message somebody what I want to tell them, and they walkie-talkie me back when they want to.

I encourage you guys to figure out ways to break up active communication and train your partners, your staff, your employees, into the inactive kind. You will get so much more done. I set my day out, so I know, “Hey, today from this time to this time, I’m working on this business, or this project, or this, whatever it is,” and I only look at e-mails and correspondence and things related to that. I shut off everything else. I’m not perfect at it. I’m still getting better at it [laughs], but I get so much more done when I do that. It’s amazing.

I promise you guys that if you will cut out active communication, cut out phone calls – you don’t call people. Don’t do meetings. Meetings are the worst thing in the world. Do not do them, especially the “Got a minute?” meetings. If you've got a staff, then you know what “got a minute” meetings are. They always end up being eighteen hours long.

Figure out ways to break up the active communication and turn things into passive communication, where you communicate back if and when you want to. And notice I said, “If.” That’s a big thing. You do not have to respond back to everyone. I would say probably ninety-nine percent of my e-mails go un-responded. I’d say probably fifty percent of my Skypes go un-responded. Just because somebody messages me, doesn't mean I have to respond back to them. I want to give you guys that permission as well, to understand that you don’t have to respond back to everybody. Just respond back to the people that you need to communicate with for the project that you are trying to move forward at that time.

If you do that, you will get so much more efficient. If you will train your partners, and train your staff, and train your employees to do that, you will become so much more efficient. I've got three partners right now that I’m trying to train on that. They’re like the talkers who want to just get on the phone and hang out and network and talk, and I’m the opposite of that. We have this thing where they will call me, and then I will text them back. But that’s the way you've got to be. You've got to be so protective of your time, because people will dominate your time. They will devour it, and they don’t care. If you don’t care about it, people will run you over and so that’s my message today, for tonight.

Again, I’m going in at nine o’clock, probably planning about three hours of some awesome stuff, and then I’m going to go and take a couple of days off and party with my family, and it’s going to be awesome. I hope you enjoyed this. Again, if you like these podcasts, please leave your feedback. This is brand new. I've never done one of these before, and I would love to hear some feedback, hopefully positives. If they’re negatives, please don’t leave comments [laughs], but if they’re positive, I’d love to hear your comments. In the iTunes place would be really cool and also at our DotComSecrets.com, for more information about us and how we can help your business. Again, you guys, just take care of your time. It’s your only precious commodity that you have. Protect it. Don’t let people suck it. Don’t let people be time vampires and suck it up. Be very protective of it. I hope this helps. Thanks, everybody.

Mar 28, 2013

Russell Brunson talking about the hidden business inside of everyone’s businesses…

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you back to the “Marketing in Your Car” podcast. I hope you liked our intro song [laughs]. If you listened to the first podcast yesterday, I told you I’d been talking about doing this for 4 years, and I was having my brother do my audio/video stuff. He was going and he was putting up the first podcast, getting it all installed on iTunes, making it all work, and he was like, “Hey, do you want to use that intro we had done about four years ago for the ‘Marketing in Your Car’ podcast?” and I was like, “Oh, yeah, I forgot. We hired this dude to make an intro,” so I listened to it. It was super corny, super cheesy, but it sounded like a cool radio show, and so we’re going to use it for a while. Congratulations. You guys get to hear our awesome intro.

Right now I’m actually not driving to the office. I’m actually driving to go to wrestling practice right now. One of my buddy’s kids is in town and wanted me to beat up on him a little bit, so I’m driving there, but I just had some ideas I wanted to let you guys have some fun with. It was the thought process I’m going through.

Yesterday I talked about the power of things being rare in your business, and so when I was sitting there that day when I got to the office, I was thinking about how I could use that on anything I'm working on right now. We recently launched a new supplement, and if anyone's ever been in the settlement business, I'm learning all of the headaches that come with the inventory management and stuff [laughs] like that.

When we first launched, we had no idea if it was going to sell, so we ordered a thousand bottles, and it sold really well. When we went back, we ordered twenty-five hundred bottles, and it sold out, so then we went back and got another thing, but the thing that's annoying is that we have a six-week delay before the next order comes in. If I put in an order today, six weeks later is when we'll get the bottles back in, so it's a huge timing issue.

I'm a good entrepreneur. I'm not so good with timing and all of that kind of stuff, so all sorts of headaches has been happening. We decided to test something in the last day or so, and I don't have extensive results yet to show you guys, but so far the numbers look really good.

On our phone number, if you'll call in to order, we have a voice message thing that we're doing, and we are also tweaking the copy on the page, which basically just talks about the fact that the supplement is rare right now, which is true because we ordered our last batch of whatever it was, and they're almost gone, so we spoke to that. We talked about that and basically said, "Hey, this is a trial run. We're making sure that it sells well.”

I can't remember exactly how the script went as I'm sitting here in my car, but we did a couple of tweaks with the script, talking about how it was rare. Eventually it will be something that we have full production runs of, and at that point, the price will be X, but right now, because this is a newer thing, we want more case-based success stories. Until we sell out, this is the new price point. So far, in less than a day now of results, that’s going really, really well, so I'm intrigued and excited to watch what's going to happen over the next little while.

The other thing I want to talk about today, and hopefully this will give you guys some ideas, but one of my favorite books that I’ve read recently is a book called "Rework", by Jason Fried and the team over at 37 Signals. They are the guys that invented Basecamp. They also brought Ruby on Rails, that language about, and anyway, they’re really neat guys, and I had a chance to interview Jason a little while ago.

One of the concepts he talked about was selling your byproduct. He talked about a coffee shop which sold coffee, and they made a bunch of money, but they had all of these coffee bags they were just throwing away, and so they started selling the empty coffee bags and started this whole new business just selling that. He was talking about his business, the fact that these books they’re writing are the byproduct of all of this stuff they’re learning.

I thought it was kind of interesting. For almost the last five and a half years now, we've been running the publishing and print newsletter “HeadDotComSeekers.com”, and we've had tens of thousands of subscribers from all around the world. Tons of success stories have come from it, but it's just been that everyone in our office wrote an article about what they're doing, and we published it.

Recently I came back and said, "Look that stuffs been good, and people like it, but how do I create a product that's just phenomenal and exciting?” I kept wondering, “What are the things that people in our market really want? What are they interested in?” What was kind of cool is that in January, I was at an event. It was Ryan Deiss’s and Perry Belcher’s Traffic and Conversion event. Listening to this thing, and after, one of my friends came over to me. He's from Israel, and he said, "Hey, why aren't they sharing more of their split test results? That's the main reason why I flew all the way from Israel to here, because I want to see the results from the testing.”

I thought, "Isn't that interesting? That was his main driving point.” In our business, we test stuff all day long. We've got split tests on thousands of awesome, exciting, crazy, different things. I was trying to think of that could be the byproduct of our business, sharing in our split test results. I don't know anyone that's as much of an entrepreneurial ADD as me and has so much happening in all of these different markets. I think right now we're in twelve different markets, I believe, unless you count the Thai company I’m trying to roll out. That would be number thirteen [laughs]. But we're doing stuff in all of these different markets.

I think we have the unique perspective that most people don't have, so we share stuff that's happening in our supplement business and in our “keep running” business, and in our dating and our weight loss, in our Internet marketing, and all of these different businesses, and share the results. So that's what we're now rebranding our whole newsletter around, around testing results, and in about two months from now, we’re re-rolling out our newsletter under that new direction, new angle, and I think it's going to be really cool.

Just for you guys to think about in your business – what are the byproducts? What are the things that you're doing that just by the nature of your doing it, it’s creating something? That could be an information product. It could be creating waste. Whatever it's creating, what other side businesses are there that you can do, that you can spin off of that? I thought it was kind of an interesting topic and something you guys could think about in your businesses as well.

That's all I had for today. Again, I don't want to make these long. I want to keep them small. My goal is I’m going to be recording these while I’m driving either to work or like right now [laughs], driving to the wrestling room. Hopefully these things will be something that you guys can plug in to your car while you're driving. You can download them in the morning. I still don't know how podcasts work. I've never really been a part of one before, but download them in the morning, and when you jump into your car, driving to work or when you're driving around during the day, listen to them for ten or fifteen minutes.

My goal is that if I can give you one little idea or just get your mind thinking about something different each day, then I feel like I've succeeded and that's what my goal is. I appreciate you guys listening in, and I will try to keep giving you some good ideas. If you want more information about me or our company, please go to DotComSecrets.com. That's where we share most of our Internet marketing. Cool stuff that’s going down. I appreciate you guys, and we will talk to you again soon.

Mar 26, 2013

Russell Brunson talking about how the power of “rare” is more powerful then scarcity…

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to the DotComSecrets “Marketing in Your Car” podcast. This is episode number one. This kind of makes me laugh, because this is something I’ve been talking about doing for five or six years, ever since I first learned what a podcast was. I have never actually done it, so this is the first podcast.

My game plan in this is that basically I have a five minute drive to work every day. I'm just going to dump some marketing ideas and concepts on you on my drive. It's not going to be long or extensive, just about five to six minutes long, and that way, while you guys are driving to work every morning, hopefully you can listen to this as well and get some ideas for your business. That’s the game plan.

Today I want to talk about something that was kind of interesting to me. Saturday night, I was working on my computer late, and probably at about two in the morning or so is when my resistance to buying is at its lowest. Of course I decided, "I'm going to swing by eBay and see if there's anything cool that I can buy," which is usually a bad idea. Most days when I do that I end up a thousand dollars poorer, by the time it's all said and done. That night was no different.

So I'm in there. I'm searching for stuff. I'm trying to find something to buy. I’m looking for different marketing things and typing all of my favorite guru’s names. Finally I found this product. It's called something like "Guerrilla versus Gorilla", like Jay Conrad Livingston’s guerrilla versus a gorilla. There was a whole CD course from Chet Holmes, Jay Conrad Livingston, and Jay Abraham.

When I first saw it, I was like, "Oh, this is cool," and then I passed it, but I had it in my watch list. I went back later on that night, and I looked at it. I was looking closer. It was a cassette tape set, but Tape 2 to and Tape 4 were missing. I'm looking at it, and I'm going, "Oh man, it's missing some tapes, so I'm probably not going to buy it,” but I was like, “I kind of want to buy it now, because this is kind of interesting to me. Let me go and see if I can't find it anywhere else.”

I started searching everywhere else, and I kid you not, there is no copy of that product you can buy anywhere online at any site, even at their own site. It's impossible. I searched for another hour trying to find a copy of that product. I couldn't find it anywhere, so finally I came back to eBay. The only copy that’s there is missing 2 tapes, and it’s $200, but I go and I buy it really quickly, for $200, because I want this information. There's no one else in the world that has it apparently. You can't buy it anywhere, and so I bought that.

I told my brother. I’m like, “Scott, I just bought this thing, but Tapes 2 and 4 are gone. I need that information,” and so he searched for another hour or two trying to find a torrent site that would have them. We couldn't find any torrent sites that had them, but finally there was this Internet marketing torrent site that he was able to find it on, and we were able to download it.

I've been listening to it this week, and it's been great a great product. It really got me thinking a lot about the power, not so much of scarcity, but the power of rarity – of it being rare. I started thinking about how I could use that more in my business. I remember when I first got into this business, and I started learning how to do speaking, I started speaking at every single seminar. The very first seminar I ever spoke at was amazing, because they introduced me as this rare underground guy who never speaks, blah, blah, blah. Because of the fact that I was rare, the response was amazing.

After a year of me traveling the speaking circuits and speaking all of the time, I wasn't that rare. Some of that disappears because they can go see you anywhere. After about a year and a half, I quit speaking, and now I only speak maybe once a year. Again, when I speak now, it's kind of that rareness that comes out, and it's different. I started thinking more about my marketing. How can I cause that?

One of my mentors and someone I've worked with a lot over the last years is Dan Kennedy, and Dan always talks about positioning yourself as the guru on the top of the mountain. People can see where you are, but they can't get there directly. They have to buy things to get closer and closer to you. With Dan Kennedy obviously, you have their $40 or $50 a month newsletter, and then their $200 a month newsletter, and then their Mastermind Groups. The more money you pay, the closer to the guru you get. I just wanted to kind of throw that out there, not so much to tell you what to do, but just to get the wheels in your head spinning.

How can you become more rare, which will increase the demand for you for your time, for whatever it might be? If you're in a consulting business, the rarer you can make your time, the more you can charge. From a publishing standpoint, if you're blogging all of the time...

I've been watching recently – Ryan Deiss has been launching his Authority ROI product. I've been watching his prelaunch and stuff, and it's interesting. He's talking about bringing in a whole bunch of guest bloggers to post on your blog. I think what's interesting about that is that fact that now you can keep consistently updating your blog and having new stuff happening so that there's content, there's excitement, there's stuff still happening, but you can step back yourself and become more of a rare commodity where now you come maybe once a week or once a month and post. At that point everyone's waiting to hear what the guru has got to say. He’s finally coming down from the mountain, and now he's going to grace us with his presence, and talk.

I think it's a really interesting strategy, so I just want to throw that out there for today. It's something that's been on my mind a little bit. Again, I'm not sure of the perfect way to execute it yet, but I’m going to start working on it more and more in my business from all sorts of different levels, from a consulting standpoint, when we do consulting work, from a product standpoint, from a blogging standpoint, just, “How can I make myself more rare?”, because again, it increases the demand and the excitement for you.

But how do you do that without becoming irrelevant either? If you're not out there for too long, then you become irrelevant, and so it’s this mix of, “How do you do it? What’s the perfect formula?” Anyway, something for you guys to think about today.

I’m now at the office. I’m going to end this recording, and I hope you enjoyed it. We’re about six minutes and eight seconds long, because that’s about how far away my office is from my house. Now I know. I hope you guys enjoyed this. If this is your first time ever listening, we’re going to try to figure out how to get this thing on iTunes, so please subscribe there, and then also check out our site DotComSecrets.com to learn how to increase your business. I appreciate you guys, and we’ll talk to you again tomorrow.

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